


about a love that glows

by LunaDarkside



Category: Magic Kaito, 名探偵コナン | Detective Conan | Case Closed
Genre: An Attempt at Angst with a Happy Ending, Curses, M/M, Magical Realism, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-29 21:18:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18786409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaDarkside/pseuds/LunaDarkside
Summary: The good news is that it’s not an overt time limit on his life, and it’s not anything parasitic. It’s not a life-force drainer, or a bad luck charm, or a magnet for unfortunate circumstances. It’s not going to bother him in day-to-day life.The bad news is that if Shinichi falls in love with someone, he’ll die. And they’ll die.(There is no good news, really.)





	about a love that glows

**Author's Note:**

> wow. okay. i wrote this way back in february, over the course of like two weeks (which is a goddamn record for me), and then set it aside and refused to look at it until now. why? i don't know. ask my lizard brain. as a result, this has been reread through about... once and a half? yeah.
> 
> this fic borrows exactly 1.5 elements from the movie "practical magic." the rest is entirely unrelated.
> 
> warning for the fact that i don't know how to write emotions. what are they. where are they. who are they. why are they.
> 
> mandatory listening:  
> [ "loving you" by seafret](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRztvfiu-RM)  
> [ "waking up slow (piano version)" by gabrielle aplin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTSdJEGswtg)
> 
> both of these songs were too perfect for the mood i envisioned for this fic, and i couldn't pick one as more fitting. therefore, i decided to clumsily smash two lines together for the title. #innovation
> 
> enjoy? - luna

On Shinichi’s tenth birthday, he receives, in order, the following:

  1. A box set of the Night Baron series, which he finds wildly insulting, considering that his father is both the one who wrote the books and the one who gave him the set
  2. A day at Tropical Land with Ran, her terrifying mom, and his own terrifying mom, which his mom uses as an opportunity to gossip with Ran’s mom about Ran’s dad, the latest rumors about several actors, and whether their children will ever marry each other
  3. A hand-drawn card from Ran
  4. A sweater from Professor Agasa
  5. A curse mark on the inside of his left wrist



The last one is of the most note.

Shinichi doesn’t notice it at first. He scratches at his wrist a few times throughout the day at Tropical Land, but he’s distracted by Ran daring him to ride the Mystery Coaster by himself. He notices a slight burning at dinner that night, but he’s wearing a nice shirt with tight cuffs, and he doesn’t bother to unbutton his sleeves to look at it. It’s only when he’s brushing his teeth that night that he finally gets a good look at his wrist. He drops his toothbrush at the sight of swirling, curlicued dark ink across the veiny inside of his arm.

It takes Shinichi a few seconds to pick his toothbrush up, wash it off, rinse out his mouth, and go find his mother. She’s sitting on the couch in a robe, clay smeared all over her face in a ghostly mask, magazine in hand, and she looks up when he comes in.

“Shin-chan, what’s wrong?” she asks at the sight of him loitering in the doorway, and looks over at the clock beside the TV. “Weren’t you going to bed?”

“Yeah,” Shinichi says, for lack of anything more intelligent. There’s a strange, foreign feeling of shame welling up inside him. He’s not sure why, really, but he has to swallow down against the sensation of guilt. “Um. I.” The words turn to glue in his mouth, thick and cold and immovable. His mother continues to look at him askance.

“Shin-chan?” There’s a note of worry in her voice.

Eventually, Shinichi gives up on composing syllables and instead shuffles over, pulls up the sleeve of his pajama shirt. His mother opens her mouth, but it seems the glue-word phenomena is catching, because nothing comes out, lodged tight in her throat. Shinichi doesn’t know what the look on her face means, but it’s nothing good. He knows that much.

“Oh,” she says after a long, long moment, a sound that’s been kicked out of her chest. Shinichi hasn’t cried in front of his parents since he was six and broke his arm skateboarding, but that may change. He takes a deep breath and dams up the upwelling of emotion he can feel rising within himself.

“Let’s ask Dad what to do,” he says, so quietly he thinks his mother doesn’t hear, because she doesn’t move for another ten seconds. But then she takes a deep breath and nods at him. There’s more of a smile on her face now, and she looks much more encouraging when she agrees with a chirpy, “Good idea, Shin-chan. Let’s see what your dad thinks we should do.”

Shinichi wonders how she ever won an Academy Award with that kind of acting.

His dad’s reaction is just like his mom’s: a long, startled, shocked pause that bleeds into despair before it finally settles on something Shinichi can only interpret as an attempt at reassuring. Shinichi may only be ten, and he may only have an elementary school student’s understanding of curse marks, but he knows how this works.

The specialist they take Shinichi to the next day spends a few minutes on acting starstruck by Kudou Yusaku and Fujimine Yukiko, drawing Shinichi’s blood, and exchanging pleasantries about the weather before she finally gestures for Shinichi’s arm. She inspects the mark for a solid twenty minutes, her expression never wavering, before she reaches for a thick volume titled _A Complete Collection of Curse Marks: 11 th Edition_. A short amount of flipping through the book occurs, to the baited breath of Shinichi’s parents, before she sits back and looks at them all, frank.

“Well, Shinichi-kun,” she says. “There’s good news and bad news.”

The good news is that it’s not an overt time limit on his life, and it’s not anything parasitic. It’s not a life-force drainer, or a bad luck charm, or a magnet for unfortunate circumstances. It’s not going to bother him in day-to-day life.

The bad news is that if Shinichi falls in love with someone, he’ll die. And they’ll die.

(There is no good news, really.)

* * *

When Shinichi is twelve, he comes up with a plan. He’s known about the curse mark for a while now, and he’s done his research on it. Shinichi is part of the 0.5% of the population that has a love-related curse, and part of the 0.2% under the influence of the “Curse of Tragic Love.” It’s one of the few hereditary curses left uneradicated, due to its sheer rarity, which is only enhanced by the curse’s predilection for skipping generations and descendants as it pleases. It can lie dormant in family trees before striking with no warning, as it did to Shinichi. The universe has never stopped to consider what people consider fair.

Shinichi also knows that he really can’t—and doesn’t want to—fall in love. One, because he doesn’t want to die, obviously, and two, because he wants to be a detective, and detectives don’t kill people, which is what Shinichi would do if he fell in love.

There’s no way that Shinichi can take chances with this. But he can’t do anything about it, unless he wants to isolate himself from society and never interact with another human that he could possibly fall in love with.

Until he realizes there’s another solution.

The spell is simple. All it takes is some chalk (he guiltily steals some from school), a drop of his blood (which he gets from a quick, shaky stab of a sterilized safety pin against the pad of his thumb), and the dusty attic floor at midnight on a full moon. Shinichi looks down at the carefully penciled notes in his unpricked hand, swallows hard, and clears his throat. The universe and its magic are a force to be revered. He’s not sure what might happen if he gets it wrong, somehow.

“The person I will fall in love with,” Shinichi begins, and pauses. It feels as though someone’s listening to him, as though the whole universe has stopped to look at him. He fights back a shiver and adds a stroke to the circle he’s got on the floor, trying to sound confident, sure of himself.

“The person I will fall in love with will be the most beautiful person in Japan. They will always be lucky,” he continues. “They will grow blue roses. They will make jokes when they’re sad. They will wear capes.” With each sentence, he adds another line to the seal. Warmth seems to leech out of him with every stroke. “They will be followed around by animals, like a Disney princess. They will charm my mother the very first time they meet her. They will be the kindest person I will ever know.” He takes a deep breath. The circle is almost complete. “And they will be scared of fish.”

Shinichi holds his breath as he adds the last line that seals the circle shut. This is the moment where the universe will consider his request, will measure it against the weight of the world and decide if it passes judgment.

The circle glows golden with acceptance. Shinichi feels an itch along the inside of his left wrist. Through the attic window, a wispy cloud breezes across the pale face of the moon. Blowing out a gust of air, Shinichi sinks back against the floor and doesn’t move for a long time. He can’t stop shaking. He’s safe, now. There’s no way someone like that can exist. He’s _safe_.

Safety has never felt this terrifying.

* * *

Shinichi meets Kuroba Kaito unexpectedly, on a Friday night.

He’s at a movie premiere, because halfway through whatever overhyped film was playing, the lead actor dropped dead. Shinichi—who has obtained the dubious and undesirable honor of being the homicide division’s celebrity inspector, thanks to his teenage self’s penchant for flashy deduction shows—is called to the scene, along with a slew of forensics and a couple of rookies to beat into shape. To get to the crime scene, he has to wade through a sea of shark-like reporters, who all seem to have a predilection for shoving microphones in his face and yelling shit like, “Kudou-san, any hunches on who committed the murder?” when he hasn’t even seen the crime scene. It’s a migraine in the making.

Shinichi has been stooping beside the body for a number of minutes, ignoring the pearl-clutchers rubbernecking from their velour seats, when someone claps a hand on his shoulder, with a confidence that rules out the rookies and a lack of respect that rules out the forensics team. Repressing a sigh, Shinichi turns, bland comment already halfway voiced, and is startled to see Kaitou Kid standing there in a bow tie and a pressed navy suit, in what feels like a strange reversal of roles.

“Oh. It’s you,” is the incredibly witty and clever response he comes up with. Kid quirks an eyebrow at him. Amusement is written all over him and his coiffed hair.

“Fancy meeting you in a place like this, tantei-kun,” he remarks. The only thing that betrays any hint of something other than cavalier suaveness is the way he rocks back and forth on his (likely designer) dress shoes. There’s a feeling of anticipation in the air that Shinichi doesn’t know what to do with.

Instead of responding, he snaps his mouth shut and looks back down at the lilac-clad body of the actor. He doesn’t keep up with movies enough to know who he is (was), but he does have the handsomely assholish face of a leading man.

“I’d ask what you’re doing here, but I’m assuming it’s something I don’t want to know, considering I’m a police officer,” Shinichi says eventually, once he gets tired of poking around the victim’s pockets for anything incriminating (nothing in particular, although he’s carrying a concerning number of condoms). He glances around the room, cataloguing the jewels dripping off of most of the women and a good portion of the men. “I guess there are a lot of targets around.” Kid snorts.

“You wound me, tantei-kun. I am a man of untold depths.”

“Uh-huh,” Shinichi hums, letting his eyebrows do the talking. Kid heaves a put-upon sigh.

“I’m here on perfectly legal and appropriate grounds.”

Shinichi resists the urge to say something about the number of times he’s seen Kid do something both legal and appropriate (it is a nonzero number, but not by much). Kid plows on, ignoring whatever undoubtedly unimpressed expression Shinichi is making. He cocks a hip out in a jaunty, theatrical movement.

“Are you saying you don’t recognize wildly famous extra-slash-stuntman Kuroba Kaito, tantei-kun?”

“Yes,” agrees Shinichi. Even as pop culture illiterate as he is, he’s almost certain nobody would. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Well, you’ll change your tune when I’m rich and famous and you need me to sign something so you can sell it online for a profit,” Kid—Kaito—dismisses, and leans back against an empty seat. He taps one of his feet against the ground in a quick, borderline nervous pattern. Shinichi glances around and can see people visibly trying not to look as though they’re eavesdropping, an act that seems to involve a lot of loudly remarking to one another about the weather, plans for the next week, and various sports teams. When Kaito speaks again, he’s lowered his voice. “I can tell you all about who he was cheating on his wife with, if that’s helpful?”

Shinichi looks at him for a second. He’s never seen someone look so eager to aid a murder investigation.

“That would be helpful,” he admits, standing up and dusting his knees off. He side-eyes Kaito, more out of principle than anything else. “And stop calling me tantei-kun. You know my name, Kuroba.” He gets a blinding smile in response.

Needless to say, Kuroba Kaito is unexpected.

* * *

As it turns out, Kaito really is an extra/stuntman, which silences the tiny part of Shinichi that still suspected he had snuck in to pickpocket diamonds off debutantes. Shinichi happens to catch a glimpse of him in the background of a Detective Samonji special episode, walking a tiny white dog down the street as Samonji interrogates a drug dealer in the foreground. Shinichi struggles out of his blanket nest to looking around for his phone, considering. He has Kaito’s number still (which he had initially saved as “Kuroba Kaito (1412)” before Kaito had somehow managed to swipe his phone and changed it to “kaito!” with a winky face).

 _Saw you in the latest episode of Samonji_ , he sends after a moment’s thought.

 _OOH w yuki-chan!!! she’s so cute_ , Kaito responds barely a minute later. The message is punctuated by a series of emojis, most of which involve hearts in some form or another. Shinichi is momentarily confused, until his phone begins buzzing with a photo album’s worth of pictures of a very round Pomeranian. The last picture is a selfie, with Yuki balanced on Kaito’s head while Kaito gives the camera an enthusiastic thumbs up. Shinichi is begrudgingly impressed.

 _Much cuter than you,_ is what he sends, though. He has a reputation to maintain.

 _tantei-kun ur so cruel_ , Kaito answers. _im super cute!!_ He sends a grainy selfie that he must have just taken, and the lighting is horrible, but Shinichi is almost certain that he’s lying in bed with a Rilakkuma plushie. He doesn’t really know what to do with it.

 _Definitely. And your texting style_ isn’t _deplorable_.

 _CRUEL_ , he gets, and then a moment later, _btw we should hang out sometime!! coffee on thurs may b??_

Shinichi stares at the text without moving for long enough that his phone screen blacks out, and then he fumbles his way fully out of his blanket nest and calls Ran.

“What does it mean if a guy wants to ‘hang out’ with me?” he asks the second the call goes through. There’s the expected pause, and then a little burst of staticky noise that Shinichi takes as a sigh.

“That he wants to hang out with you?” she says, slowly, as if trying to decide if it’s a trick question.

“Yeah, but he wants to get _coffee_ ,” Shinichi tells her, trying to inject meaning into his voice.

“Friends can get coffee, Shinichi,” says Ran. “We do that all the time, and God knows we’re just friends.” Nobody likes to talk about the Ten Weeks’ War, also known as the brief time they spent as a couple several years back. Shinichi tries not to think about Ran yelling at him that he didn’t love her, or him being uncomfortably aware of how right she was.

“But this is different,” Shinichi says, although he doesn’t know why. It feels different. He can’t say why, but it _does_.

“Okay,” Ran allows, after a brief pause. “Maybe it’s different. I don’t really know the situation, so I can’t say.” Her voice goes knowing. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

“That’s not what’s happening,” Shinichi says, to a meaningful hum from Ran that he hangs up on in a sulk. Onscreen, the plot has progressed to a scene in which Samonji is creeping around an unlit warehouse as a security guard ambles by his hiding spot, clueless. Kaito is playing the security guard. Shinichi sinks lower into his couch, bites his tongue, and texts Kaito back to let him know that yes, Shinichi is free on Thursday.

* * *

Kaito shows up to coffee with a bird sitting on his shoulder. The baristas all exchange anxious looks the moment they notice.

“Don’t worry,” Kaito calls to them, unconcerned about the fact that the bird has been abruptly joined by another (?) that pops out of the back of his sweater and hops onto his head. This one is a deeper shade of off-white with worryingly beady eyes. “They’re very clean. And well trained. Neither of them has attacked anyone in at least a month.” This does not seem to console the baristas, whose expressions get even more worried, somehow.

Shinichi puts his face in his hands and shoos Kaito outside, sitting him down at one of the little bistro tables in the hedged-in outdoor extension of the café. He thinks he can hear a sigh of relief follow him out.

“Text me your order,” he demands before he turns and goes back inside.

Ten minutes later, Shinichi meets Kaito at the table, with a cappuccino in one hand and a double-shot, extra vanilla syrup, extra whipped cream iced caramel macchiato in the other. He sits down, sets the cappuccino down in front of Kaito, and takes a sip of his macchiato, all the while feeling Kaito and the birds’ incredulous gazes on him.

“For some reason I expected you to be one of those soulless black coffee drinkers,” Kaito remarks after a moment of silent staring. He seems to be trying to decipher the order scrawled on the side of Shinichi’s cup. Shinichi shrugs and pulls on the straw.

“Being a six-year-old for a while changed my taste buds, I guess.” He eyes the birds—which he thinks might be doves, upon closer inspection—as they hop down onto the table and peck at the woodgrain. “Was there a reason why you brought your doves with you?”

“I didn’t even realize they were in my shirt until I was on the train and I realized that the woman next to me who was talking about calling animal control was referring to me,” says Kaito with a longsuffering sigh, even as he reaches out to pet them. There’s no disguising his fondness. “They have separation anxiety, I guess.”

“Huh.” Shinichi sets down his cup to extend a hand to one of them, borderline hesitant, until the nearest bird hops onto his wrist and cheeps at him. It’s kind of cute. He doesn’t realize he’s smiling until Kaito gives a strangled laugh. He looks up to find Kaito watching the proceedings with an—amused(?) look on his face.

“Sorry, I was just surprised. She—Heart, the dove, I mean—doesn’t like people, usually. She dive-bombs Hakuba on sight, although maybe that’s just good instincts. She must take after her father,” he adds, patting himself on the back (Shinichi rolls his eyes.) before he motions at the other bird, who’s crossed the table to chirp confusedly at Shinichi’s macchiato. “That’s Spade, by the way. Club and Diamond are at home.” Against his better judgment, Shinichi is startled into a laugh.

“Should I be surprised that you named your doves after card suits?”

“Probably not,” Kaito agrees, eyes crinkling up in a smile, before he leans forward, as though he’s about to divulge state secrets. Shinichi finds himself tilting in, as well, drawn in like a compass needle to magnetic north. “You should laugh more, Kudou. You’re cute when you laugh.”

There are about two things Shinichi can think to say in response to that, one of which is a blank “What?” and the other of which is incoherent, bewildered pterodactyl sounds, which Ran has told him are not becoming. Heart climbs up his arm until she’s cooing directly into his ear and nipping at the hair curling around the nape of his neck. In the distance, a car honks. This is a level of surreality that Shinichi was not expecting to encounter today.

“What am I when I’m not laughing?” he finally asks, after a buffering time that suggests his system needs an upgrade. Kaito grins at him, looking more like the smirky, devil-may-care Kid that Shinichi is familiar with.

“Hot as hell,” he says, so fervently that Shinichi is positive that he’s being sarcastic. He scrunches up his nose and reaches for his cup, conveying his incredulity with a raise of his eyebrows.

“Yeah, I believe you,” he says, primly swirling his straw through his macchiato. “I, for one, definitely trust the opinion of a man who wore a bowtie to a movie premiere.” Kaito clutches at his chest in agony.

“You _wound_ me, Kudou,” he gasps, tortured. “I was just taking inspiration from _you_!”

“Me as a six-year-old,” Shinichi returns, and takes vicious pleasure in Kaito’s dramatic flailing out of his chair. He almost takes his cappuccino down with him. Spade takes a break from poking around Shinichi’s drink to jump off the table and land on Kaito’s head, making curious noises as he bites at Kaito’s eyebrows.

“I’m glad _someone_ loves me and cares about my wellbeing, _Spade_.” Kaito’s voice floats up from the pavement, sulky. Shinichi feels a twinge in his left wrist that fades when he flexes it absently.

“Looks like I’ve won over Heart, though,” he says, since Heart is still sitting on his shoulder, cuddling into his neck. Kaito, having sat up, squints over at Shinichi. His mouth twitches at the corners.

“You have,” he agrees. “You’ve taken my Heart.”

Shinichi sips his macchiato.

* * *

 _r u free_ , is what Shinichi finds from Kaito around a week later when he happens to check his phone. He looks at the crime scene—culprit crying and handcuffed as he’s herded into a patrol car, body bag sealed and carted off to the morgue, fishing line carefully retrieved and sealed into evidence bags, bloodstains soaking into the concrete, bystanders whispering to each other while they rubberneck at Shinichi and the rest of the detectives—and sends back, _Yes, why?_

 _can we hang out_ , he gets a second later. Shinichi checks his watch. It’s still early, around six, and he doesn’t have to come into work until late tomorrow, so in theory, it should be fine. He sends back a _Meet at my house? I can get bento from the convenience store or something. Unless you want actual takeout._

_!!! bentos fine ill bring the movies c u soon!!!_

“You’re not staying for the interrogation and write-up, Inspector? That’s a first,” remarks one of his officers in passing, when Shinichi making his way out and saying his goodbyes. She looks him up and down, waggling her eyebrows. “Hot date?”

Shinichi pauses to think about it.

“Lukewarm date, maybe?” he says. She laughs and pats him on the back.

“That’s cold, Inspector, pun intended. Don’t let her hear you saying that, maybe.”

“I don’t think they’ll mind,” Shinichi says, smiling, and adds a “Have a good night, Horimoto,” before he heads to the nearest convenience store. There’s one down the corner, and he spends a minute talking to the cashier about the case that happened down the street, yes, it’s a tragedy, he seemed like such a nice man, it’s unbelievable that he would push his elderly father-in-law off his balcony and try to make it look like a suicide.

 _What kind of bento do you want?_ he sends to Kaito when he’s staring down at the selection spread out in front of him. When he doesn’t get an immediate reply he adds, _Salted salmon looks good, if that’s a deal breaker._ There’s a bento with a surprisingly sizeable piece.

 _nnnooo!!!! aasidw fsh no bad no_ , is the incoherent response he receives. Shinichi takes that as a no. Perhaps Kaito is allergic. He goes for a karaage and salad combo for Kaito and a gyuudon for himself to be on the safe side, casting a longing look at the salmon bento before he goes to pay.

The lights are already on when Shinichi gets home, a reminder that Kaito is still Kid and therefore many standard deviations above the norm when it comes to dismantling security systems, even ones as complex and sensitive as Shinichi’s. Kaito is waiting at the open front door by the time Shinichi makes it through the front gates, having seen him coming. Shinichi hefts the plastic bag he’s carrying and cracks a grin, which earns him a half-smile.

“I got you barley tea to drink. Hope that’s okay,” Shinichi says. Up close, Kaito looks tired, worn out, edges softened with handling, but he still beams at Shinichi and leans against the doorframe with a hip out at a jaunty angle.

“That’s great. What did you get for yourself? Calpis? Ramune? Qoo?”

Shinichi elbows him aside, kicking the door closed behind him. Kaito seems to have found the collection of guest slippers, and from that, the one pair that have little cat heads embroidered on them.

“Melon soda,” he says, and then, “And no, you are not allowed to comment,” at the shit-eating grin that Kaito has on.

“I said nothing!”

“Your face is saying enough, thanks,” Shinichi points out, and then is startled when there’s a loud coo and a rustling sound and Heart comes streaking out of the living room to land on his head and peck at his hair. He lifts a hand to pet blindly at her, earning himself a series of squawking, pleased chirps. “I didn’t realize you were bringing the kids.”

“How else would they get to know their dad?” Kaito says, which Shinichi finds a strange response. He frowns.

“You live with them. Don’t they already know you?”

Kaito just smiles at him and turns for the living room.

“I took the liberty of picking the first movie,” he announces as he goes. When Shinichi enters the living room, walking carefully to avoid displacing Heart, he finds a muted movie menu waiting on the TV screen, cycling through a series of scenes too fast for spoilers. He doesn’t recognize either of the actors, but they’re both handsome enough that he’s sure they’re famous. Kaito hits the play button and unmutes once they’re settled in.

Half an hour in, Shinichi has figured out what they’re watching.

“Hey, this is that indie film that won a bunch of awards at a film festival last year. My mom told me about it when it happened,” he says, proud of himself for recognizing it. Heart abandoned them a little while ago to roost with Spade in the kitchen, so he’s free to spin around to grin triumphantly at Kaito. “It’s the one with the two guys who are soulmates.” Kaito startles, almost knocking his bento into the sofa.

“Wow, spoilers?” He doesn’t seem actually upset, though. Shinichi points at him with his chopsticks.

“You’re the one who chose the movie. I’m assuming you know the premise.”

“Well, yeah.” Kaito is still looking at him a minute later, when Shinichi glances back over. He’s absently pushing a piece of karaage around his bento tray. “So what do you think?”

“About the movie so far?” Shinichi peers back over at the screen. The two guys are passing each other on a busy sidewalk in slow motion, as a dramatic soundtrack swells to life in the background and there are many tight close-ups. It fits into the category of movies he classifies as “Oscar bait.” “It’s very, uh, artistic?”

“Obviously, but what about the _content_?” Kaito’s not looking at him anymore when Shinichi turns to look at him. He’s picking at grains of rice, one by one, and arranging them into the outline of a cat head.

“The fact that they’re both guys doesn’t bother me,” Shinichi starts, not sure what he’s being asked. Kaito gives a faint laugh.

“Good to know,” he mutters before he finally looks up from his bento. “What about the soulmate thing?”

Reflexively, Shinichi’s gaze drops to Kaito’s wrists. There’s enough reverence and pity given to people stricken with magic marks that a large percentage of the unafflicted will cover their own wrists out of respect, with thick watchbands or bracelets or cuffs. Kaito seems to follow that tradition; he has on a leather bracelet that obscures his right wrist and then some. Shinichi adjusts his own watch at the reminder.

“So?” Kaito prompts. Shinichi thinks he didn’t miss the way Shinichi looked at his wrists, because he’s holding his hands still now, no longer fidgeting with his food, the cat face abandoned. “What do you think?” Shinichi blows out a breath and glances back at the screen.

“What do I think about soulmates?” It takes a moment for Shinichi to puzzle over it. Soulmates marks, in the eyes of society, are a gray area: they’re distinctly related to curses, and they’re occasionally even more finicky, but there’s also a measure of romance entangled in them, because they signify that the universe looked at two people out of seven billion and decided they were halves of the same soul. Many a romantic drama has cited soulmate marks, despite that they affect less than 2.3% of the population, as a basis for forever love.

For his part, though, Shinichi can’t help but feel like soulmate marks must be their own kind of burden, knowing there’s a perfect someone waiting for you when they’re a someone you didn’t choose. He knows and hates how it feels to have a degree of freedom in your romantic future be taken from you (though in his case, it’s all 360 degrees).

“I’m not one of those people who think they’re the same as curses,” he says finally. He can feel Kaito’s gaze on his cheek. “But I don’t know that I think they’re as romantic as how this”—he gestures at the TV screen, where the two leads have finally crossed paths in a kitschy old-fashioned ice cream shop—“is making it out to be.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I mean, I doubt most soulmates meet and immediately do—that,” Shinichi points out. The two leads are now pressing each other up against the counter. It’s very obvious this is not a film based in reality, because nobody tries to break them up with a broom and nobody in the ice cream shop is hastily covering their children’s eyes. “Meeting and immediately jumping into a perfect relationship—it seems unrealistic. It probably takes time to figure out how you fit together.”

Kaito doesn’t say anything for long enough that Shinichi looks over at him, a little worried that he’s said something wrong. Kaito doesn’t look angry or offended, though, just thoughtful, and when Shinichi catches his eye, he winks with characteristic sleaze.

“Well, I think they fit together pretty well, don’t you?” he says, tilting his head towards the screen with an overdone leer, and Shinichi is abruptly reminded that this film had an NC-17 rating, though he wasn’t expecting the movie to earn it in an _ice cream shop_. He covers his eyes against a torrent of thuds and—sounds. His ears are hot.

Kaito blatantly laughs at him.

Later, when they’re done with their bento and two more movies (one about a high school volleyball team and one about a doomed space mission) and it’s late enough that Shinichi has caught himself yawning twice in a span of ten minutes, Kaito clears his throat. It’s pronounced enough to be purposeful. Shinichi, midway through yet another yawn, glances over at him. In the harsh glow off the TV screen—they’d dimmed the lights after finishing dinner—Kaito’s face is pale and luminous.

“Thanks for having me over, Kudou,” Kaito says, quiet, as though it’s a confession. “I like spending time with you, believe it or not.”

Shinichi smiles over at him. His hair is flat on one side from slumping against the back of the couch, and he has the inexplicable urge to reach over and smooth it out. He clenches his hand around the feeling.

“It’s nothing,” he assures, and then, in a fit of candidness, “Somehow I had this feeling that you weren’t having a great day. I’m glad I could make it even a little better.” Uncharacteristically, he gives in to the desire to drop a hand into Kaito’s hair, massaging gently through the flattened parts and then, when he runs out of those, the areas around his ears and neck. Kaito’s hair is softer than expected. Kaito’s head rises briefly, almost as though he’s surprised, before he gets out a soft laugh. He isn’t looking at Shinichi in the face.

“Yeah. I had a few auditions last week for some roles, but.” He gives a little shrug. “No takers. Guess my pretty face is just too intimidating for casting directors. Can’t have an eternal extra like me taking attention away from the leading men.” Shinichi feels his heart drop into his stomach, a sudden jerking plunge that almost dizzies him, and tries to stop his hand from tightening against the nape of Kaito’s neck. Kaito is too good of an actor—see: his disguises as Kid, the performance he’s putting on right now—to be left unacknowledged as an extra.

“Your face is pretty intimidating,” he agrees. “I expect to see it on billboards and movie posters by the end of the year. If I don’t see a single sports drink advert with you on it by January, I’m going to be shocked and offended at the world’s lack of taste.” Kaito gives an incredulous but not displeased laugh.

“Kudou, it’s September.”

“I said what I said.” Shinichi squeezes once before he lets go of Kaito. His wrist twinges as he does; maybe he was gripping too tightly. Kaito didn’t say anything about it, though. “Are you questioning the word of the youngest and most accomplished inspector in the entire Tokyo metropolitan police force?” This wrings a real laugh out of Kaito, and he finally turns to meet Shinichi’s eyes.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I guess I shouldn’t bet against the guy everyone’s calling the Modern Holmes.”

“Of course you shouldn’t,” Shinichi sniffs.

Not a week later, Kaito lands a supporting role in a primetime medical drama and calls Shinichi nearly yelling with excitement. Shinichi does not bother to suppress his smugness.

* * *

A few days into October, Shinichi has the dubious honor of being invited to Kaito’s house for a costume party at the end of the month.

“Why a costume party?” he asks, confused, when Kaito calls to tell him about the party. That’s a thing they’ve been doing as of late, calling each other, though it’s mostly Kaito calling Shinichi, if Shinichi stops to think about it. Shinichi is more of the “text the occasional update and proof of life” type. Kaito called that “depressingly barbaric” and instituted daily calls that Shinichi answers in order to dodge the accusing, sad animal pictures Kaito will flood him with if he doesn’t.

Over the line, Kaito makes a bewildered sound.

“It’s October?” he says, with the intonation of someone saying “Water is wet?” or “Earth is round?” Shinichi pauses, meeting his own confused gaze in the steamed-up bathroom mirror. Kaito always has a knack for calling at somewhat inopportune moments; he’s a minute out of the shower. He flicks his wet hair off his forehead and frowns.

“And?”

“Halloween, sweetheart,” Kaito answers, and laughs, sweet and warm. It’s a hot chocolate kind of laugh. “You’re adorable.”

“Thanks, I try,” Shinichi drawls. He noticed that Kaito seems to like flirting, with whomever he can manage to entice. Last week when they met at Colombo for a quick lunch before one of Kaito’s auditions, Kaito spent a solid five minutes drawing comparisons between their waitress’s eyes and the Milky Way before he ordered his curry rice. The girl had been glowing the rest of their meal. Knowing this, that Kaito is simply a natural flirt, Shinichi has decided that he’s not going to let any of it bother him.

“So what are you wearing?” Kaito says, out of nowhere. Shinichi frowns and looks down at himself, squishing the bathmat between his bare toes.

“Nothing?” he ventures. There is a crackling sound from the other end, something like someone choking or several cats with pneumonia. Shinichi pulls the phone from his ear, peers at the screen, finds nothing wrong with it, and puts it back against his face. “Kuroba?”

“That wasn’t an attempt at phone sex, Kudou, that was me trying to ask what costume you were thinking about wearing. To the party,” Kaito says around a sequence of coughs. Shinichi blinks and makes a face at his reflection, which reveals that he’s gone pink with embarrassment. Nothing quite like admitting to your rival-turned-pseudo-friend that you’re naked.

“Oh. I was wondering why you were asking. I just got out of the shower, so.” He clears his throat. “Usually, when there’s a costume event I have to go to, I go as a police officer. When I got promoted to inspector, Hattori got me this fake police officer uniform as a joke. It works well enough whenever I have to dress up.” He heaves a long sigh. “The only downside is that it has rip-off pants.”

There’s a pause.

“Kudou,” begins Kaito, sounding disproportionately thrilled, “are you telling me that you’ll come to my party dressed as a stripper cop?”

Shinichi hangs up on him.

In the end, Shinichi does show up to Kaito’s party dressed as a “stripper cop,” but it’s only because he’s been buried in casework for the last week and he didn’t have time to go shopping for anything else. The Velcro is itchy against the outer seams when he knocks on Kaito’s door, which has been covered in swooping orange and black streamers and what he hopes is fake blood.

Kaito answers a second later. He’s dressed as a prisoner, in an orange jumpsuit with a nametag that reads “#1412.”

“This is all a little too on-the-nose for me,” Shinichi says blankly. Kaito winks.

“Wow, what a coincidence,” he half-yells, in a voice that means it’s definitely not a coincidence and is, in fact, something Kaito planned. “We’re in couples costumes!” Shinichi side-eyes him.

“The criminal justice system is not romantic,” he tells him. Kaito shakes his head at him, hands on his hips, before he opens the door wider. Shinichi looks past his shoulder to see the party in full swing, ambient lighting and low bass pumping just quiet enough not to disturb the neighbors. In his sightline, there are four cats (two of which are low-effort headbands and two of which are full-on face-paint), a Spiderman, and a Sherlock Holmes that Shinichi thinks might be Hakuba Saguru from the theft division.

“Well, what are you waiting for, Officer Sexy?” Kaito prompts.

“It’s actually Inspector Kudou, but okay,” Shinichi says, and follows Kaito into the house, where Kaito drops him off with a pat on the back when there’s another knock at the door, leaving him to navigate the party on his own. Most of the guests have congregated in the living room, clustered in groups deep in discussion, and Shinichi either doesn’t know or recognize most of them, though he can’t say that his and Kaito’s friend groups have overlapped very much.

He spends a few minutes introducing himself to cluster consisting of a witch, a rabbit, and a sexy fireman—the sexy fireman stares at Shinichi’s pants for a long moment before he says, knowing, “You too? How much do you charge?” which is a new and unpleasant situation—before he retreats into a conversation with Hakuba, who really is the Sherlock Holmes Shinichi saw earlier. After that, he mills around, fourth or fifth wheeling several more groups—some of which include actors he recognizes from guest roles on Samonji—until he’s had enough and takes the socially awkward route of retreating into the kitchen.

There’s a surprisingly comprehensive lay of Halloween-themed food and drinks—pumpkin seed brittle, brie mummified with strips of puff pastry, cheesecake squares topped with frosting ghosts, cake pops decorated like monster faces. Shinichi has to appreciate a man so committed to his theme that he’s willing to buy hyper-realistic plastic spiders to put in cocktails. He prods at the one in his chocolate martini with a stirrer (just to check) before he takes a hesitant sip.

“You’re Kudou-kun?”

Shinichi almost jumps, not expecting to be addressed, and sets down his cocktail. He turns to find one of the cats looking at him. Looking closely, he thinks she might be Nakamori’s daughter, but he’s not sure, what with all the face paint.

“Nakamori-san?” he tries. She nods, adjusting her cat ears as she goes.

“Nakamori Aoko, Kaito’s best friend,” she says. “And you’re Kudou Shinichi.”

“Yep,” Shinichi says, when she doesn’t add anything to that statement. He’s not used to being looked at quite so assessingly, as though he’s a pair of scissors someone’s trying to smuggle onto an airplane. “That’s me. Nice to meet you?”

“Yeah,” agrees Aoko. They make small talk for a few minutes—the weather (unseasonably hot yet still nice), the new train line opening (nice, but the traffic caused by construction is irritating), and the Tokyo Spirits’ season (dismal; Big Osaka is dominating the league)—before something in Aoko’s face changes and she goes in for the kill, or whatever her goal was for this conversation. “Hey, so this is kind of random, but what do you think of Kaito?”

“Of Kuroba?” Shinichi blinks, caught off guard. “Um, he’s… fine?”

“Is that all he is? There’s nothing _else_ you have to say about him?”

“He’s a good friend?” tries Shinichi. “Is there something you’re trying to ask about in particular, or—”

“Aoko!” Kaito materializes out of nowhere, an impressive feat for a man in a bright orange jumpsuit. He gets a hand around the back of Aoko’s neck, squeezing enough that Aoko’s shoulders come up in instinctive defense. Shinichi stares, surprised at how aggressive Kaito seems. His expression is edging into manic. “Let’s go back to the living room and talk to Hakuba and Keiko and _not_ ask Kudou _really unnecessary_ _questions_ , okay?”

Aoko, for her part, is not cowed by the massive amounts of killing intent that Shinichi can feel radiating off of Kaito. She throws him off her with a flick of his wrist, fixing her hair where he disturbed it.

“I’m just looking out for you, Kaito,” she informs him, which makes limited sense to Shinichi, before she gives him a last polite smile and a “It was nice meeting you, Kudou-kun,” and slips out of the kitchen. Shinichi is left arching an eyebrow at Kaito and his tight smile.

“You’re acting weird,” he remarks, sipping the last of his martini. The plastic spider in his glass looks even more realistic when it’s unsubmerged. “Weird even for you, I mean.”

Kaito opens his mouth to say something, defend himself, but someone dressed in a full-body Rilakkuma costume sticks their head into the kitchen to yell, muffled through the giant plushie head, “There are you are, Kuroba! Yo, do you have any more fake blood leftover? Asking for a friend who’s definitely not into bloodplay.”

“Underneath the bathroom sink, and no, Ryou, you and Makoto can’t use my guest bedroom. Just take it home with you or something,” Kaito says before he puts a hand on Shinichi’s shoulder and steers him towards a back door that Shinichi hadn’t been paying attention to before. “Let’s get some air.”

Shinichi grabs a cake pop on his way out.

The door turns out to lead outside the house, into cool night air and an overabundance of darkness that has Shinichi squinting. Kaito fumbles for a moment before he hits a switch and light floods the—garden, it looks like. While Kaito’s backyard isn’t large by any means, it’s filled with a dizzying number of rosebushes, in colors ranging from pastels to deep jewel tones. Shinichi wonders how much of Kaito’s life is spent out here, tending to the flowers.

“Wow, this is some garden you’ve got here,” he remarks, unable to keep the wonder of out his voice. He steps forward to examine the nearest row of roses. Kaito makes a sound behind him.

“Those aren’t perfected yet,” he says, sounding almost embarrassed. Shinichi frowns, stooping to look closer. They’re perfectly formed, the petals bleeding from a soft indigo to a richer purple. They seem fine to him. At the very least, they’re much better than the roses he sees at grocery stores.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“I’m trying to breed true blue roses,” Kaito sighs. “So far, I’ve gotten it right with a few of the other shades of blue, like powder blues and periwinkles”—he gestures vaguely towards another part of the garden—"but breeding a true-blue rose is still in the works. I’m still working on figuring out the genetic modifications I’ll probably have to do to get it right.” Something twinges in a corner of Shinichi’s mind. Blue roses. He frowns down at the bush.

“But anyway,” Kaito is saying when Shinichi straightens up and turns to face him. He looks ridiculous, backlit in his jumpsuit and still wearing house slippers. “I didn’t drag you out here to talk to you about my rose garden.” Shinichi lifts an eyebrow at him.

“Yeah? Why’d you drag me out here, then?”

Kaito looks at him for a long time. Shinichi doesn’t know why. He stares down at the cake pop he forgot he was still holding. It has a green icing face and dark chocolate hair and a smirky, crookedly drawn mouth. He thinks it’s supposed to be Frankenstein’s monster.

“I just wanted to apologize for whatever Aoko said to you,” Kaito says eventually, with a level of gentleness that Shinichi isn’t expecting from him. Kaito, in large part, is an amalgamation of flirtation, teasing, and shamelessness that doesn’t often leave room for what Shinichi would classify as tenderness. “Did she say anything—weird? Invasive?”

“Not really,” Shinichi begins slowly, feeling as though he’s stranded in the middle of a half-frozen lake. A step in any direction might end poorly, yet he still feels that he needs to make a move. He clears his throat. “We talked about the weather and stuff for a bit, and then she asked what I thought of you.” For whatever reason, that makes Kaito flinch.

“And what did you say?” he asks, too casually to be casual. Shinichi swallows around what feels like a golf ball at the back of his throat. Frankenstein’s monster smiles wonkily up at him.

“I said that you were a good friend,” he says, choosing the route of honesty, and instantly feels as if there’s ice breaking beneath his feet. Wrong move. He’s sunk. But when he hazards a look at Kaito’s face, he finds that he’s being looked at with a soft, warm expression, an expression that he thinks might be a cousin of fondness. There’s nothing approaching judgment or hurt, which is startling, for some unexplainable reason.

“That I am,” Kaito agrees, and then, with an eyebrow wiggle and an abrupt mood change, “By the way, did I mention that this entire outfit is tear-away? We really are matching!”

* * *

It takes Shinichi an embarrassing amount of time to realize that something is not right.

He’s been entertaining the thought in the recesses of his mind, ever since the Halloween party where he discovered that Kaito grew blue roses, giving it maybe one percent of his attention. It’s probably all coincidental, if he’s being honest. He doesn’t remember the exact specifics of the spell he cast, and it’s likely just a coincidence that Kaito happens to fit the rose one. There’s no reason to panic.

Then he makes the mistake of bringing his mother to lunch.

It’s Shinichi’s day off, and his mother and father happen to have flown in from Paris to stay for a few days before they jet off to the States for some convention or award ceremony or shopping trip. When Shinichi admits, after much pestering, that the person he has daily thirty-minute phone conversations with is Kuroba Kaito, his mother squeals at a glass-shattering pitch and makes loud and continuing demands to meet him. Shinichi assumes she’s heard of him through the industry grapevine that she’s still somehow connected to, years after her last film appearance.

Kaito, as it turns out when Shinichi is forced to text him, happens to have a chunk of time free before he has a shoot, and he would absolutely _love_ to meet up with Fujimine Yukiko (and Shinichi), does this little café in Haido sound okay for them?

Things start off fine. Shinichi, followed soon by Kaito, arrives at the cafe first, because Shinichi’s mom had something she wanted to do with Ran’s mom and promised to meet them there when she finished. Kaito is wearing a green shirt, sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, that sets off his eyes in a way that startles Shinichi, and his hair is styled back off his forehead, like a Disney prince. He looks like a hot guy, which comes as more of a surprise than it should. Shinichi knows that Kaito is hot, as does anyone who’s been keeping up with the weekly installments of Cardiogram.

“Hey,” Shinichi says, setting down his menu as Kaito slides into the seat opposite him. The café has a flower market vibe, with stripped-down brick walls and chalkboards and hanging planters full of succulents. “I see you went full movie star for today.”

“Huh?” Kaito blinks and looks down at himself. “Did I?” Shinichi snorts.

“As if you’re not aware that you’re good-looking,” he says, tipping his head in the direction of the two waiters staring at him with identical awed looks from the doorway to the kitchen. Kaito doesn’t turn to look, though. A slow smile overtakes his face.

“Well, I have to say, I’m flattered, Kudou. It’s high praise coming from someone as gorgeous as you,” he purrs, which is typical Kaito, to turn it around into a chance to charm. Shinichi is still shaking his head at him when one of the waiters approaches, gulping visibly when Kaito turns in his chair to look at him. He looks young, probably around eighteen or nineteen, and is flushed bright red by the time he’s standing beside them.

“Welcome,” he stammers, gaze focused down on the table. “Uh, can I get you guys anything to start?”

“I’m not sure if we’re ready to order yet, but we’ll take some waters,” Shinichi tells him, smiling when the kid looks up, catches his eye, and hurriedly looks away again. The kid’s neck is red when he nods and scuttles off, back to the safety of the kitchen and the frantic whispers of his coworker. Shinichi suppresses a smile.

“You’d think the kid had never seen a movie star before,” he says, dropping his chin into one hand. Kaito rolls his eyes.

“First of all, I’m hardly a movie star,” he laughs. “And second of all, maybe he’s in awe of the youngest, most accomplished inspector in the police force.” Shinichi shakes his head, wondering if they’re actually going to argue about this.

“You didn’t see how he was looking at you.”

Kaito arches one of his artfully sculpted brows at him. Shinichi thinks he might have gotten them shaped, sometime between the last time they hung out and now.

“You pay attention to how people look at me?” he asks, tone toeing the line between joking and serious. It makes Shinichi uneasy, unsure of how to answer with the new electric tension charging the air. Something in his stomach shifts. He glances down at the menu, reads a few lines—arugula salad, croque monsieur, smoked salmon bagel, personalized pizza—and garners enough confidence to look up and flash his most sarcastic smile.

“Well, I have to scout out the competition, don’t I?” he says, aiming for sardonic. Kaito’s eyes widen, enough that Shinichi is struck by a jolt of regret, but they’re interrupted by their waiter hurrying up with two condensation-laced glasses of water.

“Sorry about the wait, I’m, I—” he begins, setting a glass down in front of each of them.

“No, don’t worry about it, you’re totally fine,” Kaito says just as the kid puts down Kaito’s glass, and the kid jumps, his hand knocking against the glass and sending it toppling into Kaito’s lap with a cold-looking splash. Kaito makes a squeaky sound.

“Oh my God!” The kid, unsurprisingly, looks mortified, as well as redder than any tomato Shinichi has encountered. From the way his eyes are wide and panicked and gleaming wet, Shinichi is worried that he’s about to burst into tears. “I’m so, so sorry! I, um, I’ll—let me get a towel for you, please, I’m so—” He stops flailing when Kaito taps the back of his hand, gentle and friendly, his mouth open, and doesn’t get to say anything else before Kaito does something flippy with his fingers and is abruptly and magically holding a white rose, which he extends to the kid. The guy takes it, looking dazed, while Kaito smiles at him.

“Don’t worry about it, bud, you’re still fine,” he says, reassuringly. “It’s kind of flattering that I could be so distracting that people drop glasses and stuff around me, you know? Ups my self-confidence.” He rolls back his shoulders and makes a show of cracking his neck, grinning up at the kid. Shinichi shakes his head at him. A rush of fondness sweeps over him.

“I’m pretty sure your self-confidence should have maxed out by now,” he says. Kaito pouts at him.

“You’re no fun, sweetheart,” he sighs, before he turns back to the kid, who at least is managing to meet his eyes now, even if he’s biting down on his bottom lip. “Hey, don’t panic. I’m not going to leave an angry Yelp review over this. Well, unless you spit in my face now.” When the kid doesn’t do anything but gape at him, Kaito smiles. “Think you’re safe, then. I’ll live. This is hardly the worst thing to happen to me when I’m with this one, anyway.” He nods at Shinichi, to which Shinichi sticks his tongue out in a gesture of his immense maturity.

“I’m really sorry anyway,” the kid mumbles. Kaito reaches up to pat him on the head, quick enough to be friendly instead of creepy.

“You’re all right, kid. But I could go for a towel or something, before I have to amputate,” he says amicably, and the kid nods desperately before he jets off to the kitchen, where his coworker and two cooks have congregated to watch the proceedings. Shinichi watches him go before he turns to shake his head at Kaito.

“You’re a softer touch than I would’ve thought, Kuroba.”

“That’s me, a real bleeding heart,” Kaito smirks before he shudders, looking uncomfortable for the first time. “We’re staying here until this”—he waves a hand at his lap; Shinichi resists the urge to look under the table to inspect the damage—“dries. I’m not leaving here looking like I pissed myself.”

“An admirable goal,” says Shinichi dryly.

Their waiter (who turns out to be named Masaki, an eighteen-year-old student at Teitan, and who is, in fact, an avid watcher of Cardiogram) returns with towels and complimentary lemonades, which Shinichi and Kaito are drinking when Yukiko finally shows up. She’s decked out in a satiny dress and giant sunglasses that she pulls off with a shriek the second she lays eyes on Kaito.

“Kai-chan!” she yells, throwing her arms out wide, and—what? That’s familiar, even for Fujimine Yukiko, who notoriously hugged the police commissioner the first time they met. Shinichi blinks, bewildered, when Kaito climbs to his feet and hurried over to lean into a side-hug.

“Sorry, there was an accident with my pants,” he says when Yukiko pulls back and makes a sad face at him at the, by her standards, insufficient surface area within the hug. They both laugh, and then Yukiko links an arm through Kaito’s and tows him back to the table where Shinichi is watching openmouthed. Within seconds, they devolve into a conversation about the procs and cons of filming on location, the open secret of two-time Academy Award winner Suzuhara Akio’s secret relationship with his makeup artist, and audition tips.

“Uh, did you guys… do you know each other?” Shinichi asks, tentative, in the middle of a lull. He’s out of lemonade, but he’s full on confusion. Yukiko and Kaito both blink at him.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Yukiko says, brow creased with confusion. “Kai-chan’s dad, Kuroba Toichi, was the one who taught me how to disguise. He was a great acting coach. I actually met Kai-chan for the first time when he was… Kai-chan, how old were you?”

“Six? Maybe seven?”

“Yes, probably around there. He was such a little charmer at that age! Offered me a flower and everything. What a little gentleman,” Yukiko coos, reaching across the table to pinch Kaito’s cheek with one hand. “Adorable. And still so cute now!”

“Stop, you’re embarrassing me,” whines Kaito, though Shinichi can tell that no such thing is happening, both from the shit-eating grin he’s wearing and the halfhearted way he’s batting at Yukiko’s hands. “It would’ve been more of a crime not to give a flower to such a beautiful young lady.”

“Aw, Kai-chan!”

They continue going back and forth like that for a while, and normally Shinichi would be alarmed at how well they’re getting along (and disgruntled at how much Kaito is flirting with his _mother_ ), but mostly all he can hear is the rushing of blood past his ears. His mother’s voice saying _He was such a little charmer at that age_ keeps replaying over and over in his mind. Sweat breaks out along his temple, and he wipes at it with the back of his hand. That sounds like—it’s almost as if—

“Shin-chan?” Shinichi starts when Yukiko puts a hand on his arm. He looks up to find that both his mother and Kaito are peering at him, worry visible on their faces, carried in lines around their eyes. “Are you okay? I know we’re probably boring you with industry talk…”

“Oh, no.” Shinichi pastes on his media smile, the one he uses when he no-comments his way out of a crowd of reporters. “I was just thinking about, uh, a case that I’ve been working. It’s fine. You two go ahead and catch up.” Yukiko nods, accepting it, and turns back to Kaito to say something about breathing exercises and the optimal way to hold your shoulders and torso when auditioning for yakuza roles.

It’s fine, Shinichi tells himself, even though he _knows_ , somehow, deep in his heart, his soul, his bones, his goddamn curse-marked _wrist_ , the way he _knows_ when he’s solved a case. He knows with unshakeable surety. Even so, he takes a long breath and tries to hammer the thoughts out straight in his head. It’s fine. His mother is easily charmed. She was charmed by Hattori the first time she met him. It doesn’t mean anything.

The lie is just as hard to swallow as the arugula salad he chokes his way through.

* * *

He finds the spell the second he gets home. The notebook, pages left empty save for the one containing the spell’s specifications, sits on his bookshelf, wedged unassumingly between his Agatha Christie collection and some old calculus textbooks. He yanks it free with shaking, unsteady hands, sending _An Introduction to Multivariable Calculus, Third Edition_ skittering across the floor when he accidentally pulls it out as well.

There’s a sinking feeling in Shinichi’s stomach the second he opens the notebook, the feeling of having the worse hypothesis, the least satisfying deduction proven true. There on the page, he can see everything—all his carefully chosen specifications, all rendered meaningless—written in his own childish handwriting, faded with time but damningly legible all the same.

Kaito isn’t the most beautiful person in Japan, he tries to tell himself as he runs a fingertip over the letters, his throat so dry it sticks when he swallows. Even if Shinichi, in his heart of hearts, thinks he is. Objectively, it just can’t be true. And Kaito isn’t eternally lucky, either. A guy whose father was killed by a murderous secret organization can’t be considered “always lucky.” And as far as he knows, Kaito isn’t particularly scared of fish.

His traitorous mind—or perhaps the universe—pulls up memories, though. Evidence. Supporting arguments to counter whatever excuses he’s trying to make. Kaito dressed as Kid, cape billowing out behind him. Kaito in the garden beside his roses. Kaito joking about his face being too pretty for casting directors after being rejected. Kaito being followed around by Heart and Spade. Kaito laughing with his mom and offering her a rose at the end of lunch. Kaito reassuring a terrified waiter even with a lapful of ice water. Kaito calling him every day. Kaito flirting and teasing and challenging. _Kaito._ Each memory feels like a stab to the sternum, an _it’s-too-late_ in his ear, even as the thought of Kaito makes Shinichi warm all over.

 _It’s-too-late_. _It’s-too-late_. It’s too late.

Shinichi doesn’t realize he’s dropped the notebook until he hears the thud of it hitting the ground. His wrist burns. When Shinichi unbuckles his watch to look at it, he sees the edges of the mark glowing a caustic indigo. His heart thumps away in his chest at the sight, adrenaline and panic rising in equal measure.

“I’m not in love with Kuroba Kaito,” he announces to the silent room. His breathing betrays him, shallow and fast enough that he feels lightheaded standing there. He can’t be. He can’t—he can’t kill Kaito. He won’t. He’s not in love with Kaito. “I’m _not_.”

He’s never felt more scared in his life.

* * *

Shinichi tries to pull back.

It’s the only course of action that makes sense, really. Now that he’s almost sure that Kaito is the one person that he can fall in—the one person that he’s able to—the one person that he’s—the one person that he could possibly end up killing, it would be insane not to try to put the brakes on the whole thing. It’s stupid, though, that he isn’t able to cut Kaito out completely, because he just—likes Kaito. He really—likes Kaito. He would miss Kaito, if he cut him out all the way.

Yeah, Shinichi knows. He _knows_.

Ducking Kaito’s calls doesn’t really go all that well, because Kaito just calls back until Shinichi picks up. One time he keeps calling for an hour straight before Shinichi breaks down and answers. Kaito never acknowledges that he’s being ignored, either; he just says shit like “Long shower? _Very_ interesting, Shinichi-kun,” or “Did you lose your phone charger?” that causes guilt to well up in Shinichi’s ribcage, a thick, tangible sensation that almost hurts. He has to bite back the instinctive _I’m sorry I keep dodging you; I just don’t want to kill you via my hereditary and horrible curse_ that leaps to the tip of his tongue.

They aren’t seeing each other in person as much these days, at the very least. After his run on Cardiogram, Kaito was scouted for a movie with some big names—Okino Yoko, Kenzaki Osamu, Hoshino Terumi—and he’s been spending a lot of time on set. Shinichi takes every chance he can to start going through some of the cold cases the force has accrued over the years, fighting against the statue of limitations for some of them. He makes sure that whenever Kaito is free, Shinichi is working overtime.

One day he’s at one of the cold cases’ crime scenes (an aquarium in Beika), when he gets a text from Kaito. _yooo where r u??? im @ the station and i dont c u???_

 _If you asked anyone about me, they would’ve told you that I’m out on an investigation_ , Shinichi sends back, and refocuses his attention on the decrepit aquarium owner, who is staggering through a time-tattered account of the fateful night eighteen years ago when a woman’s corpse was found floating in the octopi tank.

He finishes questioning the owner and pulls out his phone, about to Google feeding routines for octopi in captivity, and sees he’s gotten a response from Kaito. _u kno im 2 scared 2 talk 2 any of ur baby officers!!! i feel like they can smell the criminal on me!!!_

 _You’re a retired criminal, and you’re also more of a baby than any of my subordinates if you’re scared to ask them_ , Shinichi returns before he opens his web browser to do some research. He’s pretty sure that the octopi feeding schedule shouldn’t have had that many different attendants checking in at so many times, unless he’s underestimating how much octopi eat.

Five minutes later, he’s almost sure that either the owner or the aquarium manager is the culprit when he gets, _i asked hinayama (btw she’s terrifying)!! ur @ the beika aquatic center workin on some ancient octopus murder!!!_

 _I’m proud of you_ , Shinichi replies. He’s willing to admit that Hinayama is by far his most terrifying officer. He sends her in for interrogation against hardened yakuza members when he needs the intimidation factor.

 _ok c u soon!!_ is what Kaito sends, which alarms Shinichi. He’s not sure why Kaito would see him. His many texts full of question marks, though, go unanswered, until about half an hour later, when his phone dings in the middle of the arrest (it was the manager; the victim had been her ex-fiancée who had cheated on her with one of the octopi trainers; there is much crying and anguish). Kaito has texted him _meet me outside??_

 _Why don’t you come inside?_ Shinichi isn’t sure when he’ll be able to escort the culprit out. She’s pressed herself up against the octopi tank and seems to be more interested in sobbing her ex-fiancée’s name and stroking the glass than letting herself be taken to the station.

 _nno i cant_ , is what Kaito sends. Any further attempts to convince him are ignored, save for incomprehensible lines of letters. Finally, Shinichi taps one of his assistant inspectors on the shoulder.

“Will you be okay being alone with the culprit if I step out for a second?” he asks quietly. Yamazaki, eyeing the sobbing woman, nods slowly.

“I think I should be able to handle her,” he agrees, and waves Shinichi off.

Shinichi finds Kaito standing a good ten feet from the entrance to the aquarium, giving the sign over the double doors—“Beika Aquatic Center” in happy yellow lettering, surrounded by cartoon fish—a suspicious look, as though he’s found it flirting with his mother. He’s holding a box wrapped in a handkerchief, and his face brightens when he sees Shinichi.

“Good to see you alive,” he says, which is strange even for Kaito. Shinichi angles an eyebrow at him.

“The culprit is a fifty-year-woman who is currently crying into an octopi tank,” he points out. Kaito shakes his head.

“That’s not what I meant,” he says, cryptic, before he hefts up the box towards Shinichi. “Here. For you.” Shinichi blinks, but takes it.

“Is there a reason for Kuroba Kaito’s Delivery Service?” he asks, confused. Kaito does a little half-shrug. If Shinichi didn’t know him better, he would think that Kaito is blushing, but it’s most likely the chill in the air. November has brought with it a surge of colder weather.

“I just thought that I haven’t seen you in a while, and I know how you get when you’re busy. You forget to eat because you’re too caught up in the dead bodies.”

“I love being treated like a child,” Shinichi drawls. “You know, despite the fact that I spent a portion of my teenage years as a six-year-old, I’m actually able to take care of myself. I live alone. I file my own taxes. I’ve been to a notary before.”

“Ah, yes, getting something notarized. The true mark of adulthood,” Kaito agrees, nodding sagely. He grins, his teeth a slice of white against the red of his mouth. Shinichi tries not to stare, even as his wrist burns in warning. “I just wanted to do something nice for you, if I’m being honest. I feel like we haven’t really seen each other in a while?” There’s an optional question in his voice: if Shinichi wants, he can acknowledge it; if he doesn’t, Kaito will let it go. Because Kaito is that kind. Because Kaito lets him get away with everything, for reasons Shinichi can’t comprehend.

Something swells in Shinichi’s chest, ballooning larger and larger the longer Shinichi stands there holding Kaito’s clearly homemade bento looking at Kaito and Kaito’s wind-reddened nose and sticky-up hair and gently questioning eyes. There is nobody else in Shinichi’s life who treats him this way, content and accepting and unjudging no matter what Shinichi does or doesn’t do. There is nobody else in Shinichi’s life who makes him feel so safe. There is nobody else.

His wrist is scalding beneath his watchband.

Shinichi studies Kaito’s face for another moment, his heart taking up residence at the back of his throat, before he looks down at the bento he’s holding, desperate for a distraction. Upon closer inspection, the handkerchief is patterned with four-leaf clovers.

“Interesting choice of handkerchief,” he says instead of anything meaningful or _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry_. Kaito blows out a breath before he laughs a little and runs a finger over the nearest edge of the box. His hands are—not necessarily pretty, because his fingers are a little too long and a little too wide for conventional beauty, but strong all the same, scarred in some places from a trick gone wrong, nails clean and short. Shinichi really is in dangerous territory if he’s into Kaito’s _hands_.

“Yeah, it’s because of my extraordinarily good luck,” Kaito is saying when Shinichi manages to drag his attention away from Kaito’s hands, and everything stops for a sickening second. Shinichi feels his breath catch, a horrible little choke as though he’s been struck in the windpipe with a blunt instrument.

“Wait, what? What do you mean?” he hears himself say, the sound cracking and strange as if from a distance or off a recording or through a snowstorm. The wind rustles through his hair, cold on the back of his bare neck. Kaito is looking at him with curiosity, probably trying to wonder why Shinichi’s white-knuckling the bento box so hard that it’s creaking in his grip.

“It’s a joke my mom used to always make,” he begins, concern audible in his voice. “She said that I was born destined to have good luck, because our last name is Kuroba, like ‘clover.’ I mean, technically, a clover could be a three-leaf clover, which wouldn’t be lucky, but yeah. It’s just a cute thing she used to say when I was a kid.”

Shinichi feels like there’s a fault shaking to pieces directly beneath his feet.

“By any chance,” he says, “is there a particular reason why you wouldn’t go into the aquarium or eat a salmon bento?” Kaito flushes and takes a step closer.

“You noticed that?” When Shinichi nods, he groans and puts a hand over his face. “Ugh, okay. It’s embarrassing, but I’m actually scared of fish.”

* * *

Kaito gets sick in the beginning of December.

It starts off as a cough that punctuates their conversations, Kaito promising to chase it out with some Robitussin and tea and sleep. Then it progresses into a wheeze in his breathing that Shinichi can hear over the phone. Next is a congestion that swaps his m’s for b’s and gives him headaches that he tries to downplay, though Shinichi can hear the exhaustion in his voice. Three days later, he’s bedbound, unable to go to shoots or watch movies on Shinichi’s couch or come harass Shinichi with more homemade bento. Five days more and he’s only responding to every third text Shinichi sends him.

Shinichi is terrified.

He’s absolute shit at work, distracted and unfocused. It takes him two tries to fill out paperwork for a textbook manslaughter case. He almost loses a murder weapon when he puts it inside his jacket after borrowing it from forensics. The superintendent subtly hints at him to take himself off an investigation into the alleged murder-suicide of a prominent physician and his lover. Horimoto and Yamazaki are giving him increasingly worried looks when they think he’s not paying attention. In short, he’s a mess.

Eventually, Hinayama is the one to say something. She slams a hand down on his desk and waits for him to look up.

“Look, sir,” she says, curt but not uncaring, “something is clearly going on with you. We’re all worried about you.” She nods around the bullpen, and Shinichi looks around to find the faces of his subordinates staring back at him, all wearing the same expression of determined concern. He turns back to Hinayama just in time to see her set her jaw. “I don’t mean any disrespect. But you’re not in the best state of mind to be at work right now, okay? Christmas is pretty soon anyway—”

“In a few _weeks_ ,” Shinichi points out, a little incredulous.

“—and you might as well take a little break to relax. We’ve got everything covered.” Hinayama nods sharply when she finishes, as if to signify that she’s finished and is now accepting questions. When he turns to look out across the room, Shinichi is met with a sea of nodding, ranging from stoic to enthusiastic. He feels his face twist. Nobody looks as though they disagree with Hinayama.

“You really need a break, sir,” someone calls from across the bullpen. Shinichi takes a deep breath.

“I’m not sure if I should be offended that I’m essentially being pushed out by my own subordinates,” he sighs, but gets to his feet slowly. “This is mutiny.”

“It’s because we care,” Yamazaki tells him, and then, “I mean, it’s because we care, sir,” when Shinichi turns a blank stare on him. Shinichi snorts, even as he grabs his coat off the back of his chair.

“I guess I’m off to file a request for time off,” he announces, to a low cheer that makes him roll his eyes, fonder than he means to. “While I’m gone, Yamazaki and Hinayama are in charge. And they’ll tell me if something goes wrong and I’m needed.” He eyeballs his officers, pointed.

“Of course, sir,” they chorus, even though he knows they’re lying from their matching grins. Shinichi shakes his head, but goes, nonetheless.

It’s not until he’s standing on the sidewalk outside of headquarters—time off more “enthusiastically granted” than “wrangled” from the superintendent, duties delegated in more detail to a few of his more senior officers—that Shinichi takes a deep breath and heads for the nearest drugstore.

Shinichi isn’t as good as Kaito is at lockpicking—obviously; he’s a police inspector, not a thief—but he’s decent enough that he doesn’t leave too many marks on Kaito’s back door when he breaks in. It takes him a long second to go inside, though, because the sight of Kaito’s rose garden, withering from lack of care in the chill December air, makes his entire body shudder so hard that he can’t bring himself to move.

Inside, Kaito’s house is dim and silent. The kitchen is clean, the living room is vacant, and the whole place feels disturbingly tomblike in its stillness. Shinichi sets his bag of supplies down on the kitchen counter before he heads for Kaito’s bedroom.

The door is ajar. Shinichi pushes it open on noiseless hinges. Inside, the room is dark and musty, blinds pulled closed against the gray, wintery midday sunlight. The comforters layered on the bed are lumpy and misshapen, and Shinichi can just make out the top of Kaito’s head if he squints against the murkiness. Tissues and cups and half-empty blister packs are littered across the nightstand, some migrating to the floor by the bed. There’s a bucket, empty or emptied, sitting beside the edge of the bed.

Kaito is asleep, though, when Shinichi creeps closer. His face is half-obscured in the pillow, but from what Shinichi can see, his skin is pale, sallow enough to look waxy and lifeless. Shinichi has seen enough corpses to know. He’s covered in a wet sheen of sweat that sticks his hair to his face in clumps. His breathing is so muffled and uneven that Shinichi almost can’t hear it. His brow is creased in pain.

Shinichi inhales once, then twice. This must be what drowning feels like. Crushing pressure on his lungs. Rushing, filling, choking in his chest. Kicking, fighting, and still sinking.

He starts by clearing up the tissues and cups, digging around for a trash bag that he can tape to the side of the bedside table for easy access, washing the mugs in the kitchen sink. He cleans out the bucket, just to be safe. He pulls out the ingredients for corn porridge that he bought on the way and starts assembling it in the kitchen. He finds a towel and a tub that he fills with water before he goes to wipe the sweat off of Kaito, peeling back the blankets to get at his face and neck.

Kaito stirs when he does that, his eyes blinking opening in a sleepy haze.

“Shinichi?” he slurs, and Shinichi freezes. It’s the first time Kaito has called him by his first name and nothing else. He feels heat prick at the spot behind his eyes.

“Shhh,” he says, passing the towel over Kaito’s faces. “Go back to sleep.” Kaito frowns, but does. The medication on the nightstand must have something for sleep in it.

Shinichi finishes wiping him down, starts a load of laundry with the towel and the clothes lying on the floor, and goes to check on the porridge. He looks up how to take care of roses and spends an hour calculating how much plant food to give each different variety of rose. He sticks his head into the room beside Kaito’s to find the doves roosting in various places; Heart is happy to see him, but subdued. He feeds them from the bag of bird food he finds in the kitchen and changes their water supply. He moves the laundry to the drying machine and goes to check on the porridge. It’s done, and it’s not great, not as good as Ran’s, but it’s good enough. He brings a tray of it to Kaito’s room, along with water, energy drinks, and some over-the-counter medication he brought. He finds a new towel, wets it with cool water, places it on Kaito’s forehead, and steps back when he stirs.

“Shinichi?” Kaito mumbles again, his eyes unfocused and filmy when they shiver open. “Am I dreaming?” Shinichi wants to scream, all of a sudden, and swallows back against the urge.

“Yes,” he says softly, reaching forward to put a hand against the hot, feverish skin of Kaito’s cheek. “You’re dreaming.”

“Hm.” Kaito shifts, the barest hint of a smile working onto his face as he tilts his face into Shinichi’s hand. “Good dream, then.”

“Yeah.” Shinichi’s voice is so low he almost can’t hear it. He watches Kaito let out a sigh, eyes slipping shut, and repeats, “Yeah. Good dream.”

He blocks Kaito’s number the second he’s out of Kaito’s house.

* * *

Shinichi is pretty miserable in the following days. He spends his days off catching up with all the recent releases in the mystery/thriller genre that he’s missed, and once he finishes with those, rereads the Night Baron series from the first book. His father’s writing definitely improved over the course of his career. He puts a Google Alert on Kaito’s name, hoping against hope that he won’t wake up to find reports of Cardiogram’s rising star Kuroba Kaito being found dead in his house. Nothing surfaces. He doesn’t sleep well, regardless.

He goes back to work a week later. There’s a new case waiting for him, something with a clever, hard-to-catch culprit that Yamazaki and Hinayama saved for him. He gets to work on it, finds himself far less distracted than before, and solves it in a matter of hours. Hinayama offers him a short nod of acknowledgment and adds another two case files to the stack occupying his inbox. Life slides back into its pre-Kaito state of being.

Well. Mostly. One thing that’s changed is that Shinichi’s mom won’t stop calling him.

“Mom,” Shinichi says tiredly into the phone. He spins his chair around to avoid the curious gazes of his subordinates, who he suspects are a little too invested in his personal life. The view from the window behind his desk shows a stunningly blue sky and chaotic street, picturesque in its mundanity. “Did you need something, or is this another one of your ‘just wanted to hear how you’re doing’ calls?” Over the line, Yukiko huffs.

“What, do I need an excuse to talk to my favorite son?”

Shinichi rubs at the bridge of his nose.

“First of all, I’m your only son, so the superlative is superfluous,” he begins, to an impolite snort. “Second of all, you’ve been calling me for the last five days straight. I’m just as okay today as I was yesterday, the last time you called me in the middle of work.”

“I know, but I worry!” Yukiko exclaims. There is the slightest tinge of unease in her voice, enough that Shinichi is instantly on alert. He knows her well enough to know that there’s something more to it.

“Mom,” he says, lowering his voice. “What are you hiding from me?”

“Nothing,” she gasps, trying for offended and landing somewhere near nervous, in Shinichi’s estimation. “I just wanted to check on my baby boy, since you’ve been working so hard lately. Is that so wrong?” Shinichi refuses to be cowed.

“You didn’t call me this often when I was trapped in a six-year-old’s body and in danger of being hunted down by a criminal organization.” He takes a deep breath. Thoughts flit through his mind. Are his parents in some kind of trouble? Is his dad sick or something? Are they on the run now? He doesn’t know why his mother wouldn’t just _tell_ him, though, if that was the case. “Mom, what’s going on?” There’s a long, long pause that only ratchets up Shinichi’s anxiety.

Then, quiet, Yukiko says, “You have to promise you won’t get—upset, okay, Shin-chan?” Her voice is small.

“I won’t,” Shinichi promises, even though his thoughts are going panicky. What could his parents have done that would upset him? Did they try to recreate one of the Night Baron books? Did they end up killing someone while testing a new trick? Did—

“I got a call from Kai-chan,” his mother says. Shinichi exhales so hard his lungs ache when he’s done.

“Oh,” is what comes out of his mouth at the end of all that.

“He said you haven’t been answering his calls?” There’s a suspicious lack of judgment in his mother’s voice.

“Um,” Shinichi begins, trying to thinking of a good excuse, but Yukiko continues as if he didn’t say anything.

“He was feeling better—did you know that he was sick for over a week? Completely bedridden, couldn’t even go to filming, but he suddenly started feeling better, well enough to call me. And he just wanted to see if you were doing okay, or if you had said anything to me about him. I told him you hadn’t, and he went quiet for a long time and then thanked me and asked me not to mention that we had talked if you did end up calling me. He sounded—resigned,” she says. There’s a frankness to her words that makes Shinichi uncomfortable. He focuses on looking down into the street below, watching a woman tow a child along the sidewalk against the flow of businesspeople and students.

“Well, you broke your promise to him,” manages Shinichi once he’s recovered control of his tongue. In his periphery, he sees Horimoto edging towards him and turns away in preemptive warning.

“I guess I did.” Yukiko clears her throat. For all that his mother puts on an airheaded front at times, she’s more than intelligent enough to piece together what’s going on. They don’t talk about his curse mark, but it’s not as though either of them could forget about it. “I could tell that you were—that things might have been getting dangerous, from how much you talked to him and how you acted at lunch that time. I’m so sorry, Shin-chan.” Shinichi looks down into his lap and swallows. Horribly, he feels his eyes going tight and presses a hand to his forehead, trying to block everything out.

“That still doesn’t tell me why you’ve been calling so much,” he points out once he’s confident that his voice won’t come out shaky. Yukiko laughs, the noise staticky and sad, somehow.

“I just thought that I would see how you were doing, in case Kai-chan called me again. Just so I could tell him that you were doing well without lying. Since you can’t tell him yourself,” she admits, gentler than he can remember ever hearing her sound. “I can stop, if you want.” Shinichi blinks his eyes open. He doesn’t remember closing them.

“No,” he says. “You don’t have to stop. Just don’t call me during work hours.”

Across the street, there’s a billboard looming large over a parking lot attached to a Denny’s. If Shinichi squints against the glare, he can make out an image of Kaito’s face blown up larger than life, along with an airbrushed bottle of Pocari Sweat and “For your everyday marathon” spelled out in blocky white lettering beside his cocky smile.

Shinichi turns his chair back around and smiles at Horimoto.

“Sorry about that,” he says. “What can I do for you?”

* * *

The end of the year is upon them sooner than Shinichi expects: he’s suddenly inundated with end-of-the-year evaluations to complete and questions of whom to promote, on top of trying to meet his self-imposed cold case quota. It’s a sign of how—unsatisfied he is that he enjoys being stressed and harried all the time, just because being busy keeps his mind off of other, less enjoyable topics.

He finally finishes everything a few days before the New Year; his officers lovingly demand that he go home and relax while they hold down the fort. Shinichi would be offended if he wasn’t so tired. As it is, he’s just grateful that they, at the very least, pretend to care about him. Hinayama deserve the promotion he’s planning to put her up for.

There’s a new Detective Samonji holiday special on that he manages to catch. Shinichi makes himself a sloppy attempt at omurice, checks his phone (two texts from Ran about meeting up on New Year’s Eve that get an affirmative, a notification from his Google Alert on Kaito that he dismisses unread, now that he knows Kaito has gotten better), and settles on the couch with his plate and a chenille blanket.

The special is well-produced, with an evocative soundtrack and artistic cinematography and strong acting. Shinichi almost wishes he hadn’t figured out the murderer within the first ten minutes. The suspenseful shots and meaningful glances are significantly less intriguing when he knows that it was the victim’s brother’s wife trying to cover up an affair.

Shinichi’s not sure when, but he falls asleep partway through the special and only realizes it when he blinks open sticky eyes and the program is no longer playing, replaced by some talk show that he doesn’t recognize. He must have been really tired, he thinks, and struggles to sit up.

He’s about to get up and take his plate back to the kitchen when he hears an unfamiliar voice say, “And now we’re here with tonight’s special guest, Kuroba Kaito-san!” Shinichi startles so badly that he almost drops his plate. When he looks at the screen, he’s met with the sight of Kaito sitting across from a classically handsome talk show host. He looks even better than usual, his hair styled, his suit cut close, his expression open and charming. He looks—happy. Healthy. Safe.

Shinichi feels a thrill of something unpleasant travel down the length of his spine. He has to look away for a second

“So you’ve recently come into the public eye, haven’t you, Kuroba-san? Your appearance in Cardiogram has made you a household name, almost overnight. How does it feel to go from being an extra to being a leading man in a production with a cast like Okino Yoko and Hoshino Terumi?” the host is saying when Shinichi manages to look back at the screen.

“Well, it’s definitely been a change. I get stopped in the grocery store, now. And I don’t have to tell baristas my name when I’m getting coffee. My neighbors actually wave at me when we cross paths instead of pretending they’ve never seen me before,” Kaito says, to laughter from his audience. He leans against the back of the couch he’s sprawled out on, casual, confident. “I mean, it didn’t really sink in until I was doing advertisements for sports drinks before the end of the year, you know? That was kind of my benchmark for whether I’d made it.” His smile goes faintly distant. “I shouldn’t have doubted it.”

“That’s some confidence you have,” the host remarks, jovial.

“I think of it more as trust,” Kaito says with a smile.

Shinichi stumbles to his feet, nearly tangles his legs up in his discarded blanket, and gets his plates to the kitchen unbroken. He spends a minute at the sink, propped up against the edge of the counter as he lets his head hang.

When he forces himself back to the living room, the conversation has progressed to hopefully safer waters.

“Any New Year’s plans?” the interviewer asks before offering a wink. “Someone you plan on spending the day with?” For the first time, Kaito hesitates.

“I mean, there’s someone I _want_ to be with,” he says, a little quietly, almost privately. The emphasis does not go unnoticed; the host looks instantly alert, with the bloodthirsty instincts of a shark as he senses an interesting story.

“Is that romantic troubles I’m detecting?” he wonders, too brightly. “Could it be that you’re in a rocky relationship?” Kaito laughs, audibly artificial.

“No, no. Just a hopeless infatuation on my part. It’s not going to come to anything, as far as I can tell.” He rubs at the back of his own neck, projecting embarrassment. “But to answer the original question, no, I don’t really have any New Year’s plans, for the moment.”

“In that case, it looks like Kuroba Kaito-san is still on the market! Ladies?” The host tosses a wink towards the camera, while Kaito smiles politely.

Shinichi swallows, looking down into his lap. There’s no reason to think that Kaito is talking about him, but maybe it’s because of his own—recovering feelings that he suddenly, urgently wants it to be him whom Kaito is referring to.

“Well, to get to the reason for this interview!” the host says sunnily. “Kuroba-san, as we’ve been saying, you really grew in popularity in the last couple months. You’ve landed roles in a lot of upcoming dramas, and then there’s the film, too. But what’s really impressive is how you also landed first place in _STYLE Magazine_ ’s end-of-the-year ‘Hottest People Alive’ rankings, despite only gaining popularity within the last few months! How does it feel to be the most beautiful person in Japan, Kuroba-san?”

If Shinichi’s heart had been in his throat before, it’s fallen straight through the floorboards now. Shinichi doesn’t expect that it will stop until it’s reached the center of the Earth, or maybe dropped straight through to the either side.

He shuts his eyes against the wave of—not quite panic, but something panic-adjacent. Something not dissimilar to despair. He’d been almost entirely sure that Kaito was the one person he could fall in love with. But to have the universe extinguish the tiniest flame of hope he’d been quietly, irrationally nurturing—the hope that maybe it was all a bizarre coincidence that Kaito fit most of the criteria and he simply liked Kaito a lot and it wasn’t possible for Shinichi to kill him and it wasn’t love—to have it extinguished feels like a bullet to the stomach.

Numbly, Shinichi shuts off the TV, climbs off the sofa, and goes to go find something alcoholic to drink. It feels appropriate.

His parents have been on enough vineyard tours that he knows they have wine, at least. They also have vodka and whiskey, along with some baijiu, which must have been an ironic gift from Hattori.

An hour later, they’re out of vodka, half of the whiskey, and most of a bottle of wine. Shinichi is lying on the floor on top of the blanket—the room had started spinning partway through the wine—and staring at the ceiling, limbs thrown out around him because he doesn’t want to think about coordinating them. He just. He. He doesn’t.

“I’m sad,” he says aloud, to no one.

Maybe he’s selfish, he thinks. Maybe he’s being stupid because he’s used to getting what he wants, and even though he wants Kaito, he can’t have Kaito, and that’s why he’s upset. Because he’s spoiled and entitled and not good enough for Kaito. Or, no. He’s not good enough for the _universe_. Because the universe was the one who decided he couldn’t have Kaito. Because the universe decided that Shinichi wasn’t—that Shinichi couldn’t—that Shinichi would kill Kaito. Because the universe decided that Kaito would die, for Shinichi.

He doesn’t want Kaito to die.

It takes a few flailing tries before Shinichi manages to pluck his phone out from between the couch cushions where it had fallen. He stares at it with swimming vision, trying to read through bleary eyes. He has ten more notifications from his Google Alert on Kaito.

Against his better judgment, he opens up the latest one. It directs him to an article and photoshoot Kaito did with STYLE Magazine, as part of being voted the “Hottest Person Alive.” The shots are artistic and balanced, with Kaito in a collection of runway-fashion outfits that he manages to make attractive rather than ridiculous. Shinichi pauses on a picture of Kaito in a loud-to-the-point-of-ugliness, half-open floral top, an eyebrow cocked at the camera as he thumbs at the boxy collar, and finds himself smiling almost against his will.

It’s not till he reaches the end of the article, though, that he has to swallow back against an abrupt swell of emotion. The photographer and writer were kind enough to include some of the rejected photos from the shoot, which means Shinichi gets to see a shot of Kaito making a face down at the plaid pants he’s been put in, lips shaped in what Shinichi expects was a self-deprecating joke. A shot of Kaito twirling to make a long pea coat flare out around him, blurry up to the neck. A shot of Kaito mid-trip, arms flailing and eyebrows high as he tries to regain his balance. A shot of Kaito laughing at something just beyond the camera, eyes crinkled up at the corners. Shinichi stares at the last one for a long, long time. The longer he looks, the more his wrist aches beneath his watch.

He doesn’t want Kaito to die.

Before Shinichi really knows what he’s doing, he’s mis-tapping his way through the settings menu until he finds his list of blocked numbers. Once he gets there, he peers at the neat lines of numbers until his eyes go blurry. He only has a few—some scammers, some telemarketers—and he picks out Kaito’s number from the top of the list. Two tries and he’s unblocked it. One try and he’s calling it.

Kaito doesn’t pick up for a few rings, which is good, because it gives Shinichi the chance to steel himself. He shuts his eyes against the swirling ceiling, takes a series of deep breaths when the first thing he sees against the inside of his eyelids is that final candid shot of Kaito laughing, smiling, alive. In-out, in-out. Everything feels slow and sticky around him, time gone viscous. What feels like an hour slides past between each uninterrupted ring of the phone.

One gets interrupted, eventually. The call goes through. Kaito’s voice comes on in his ear.

“Uh… Kudou?” It’s incredulous, but not unwelcoming. Shinichi hasn’t heard Kaito’s voice like this, personal and close to his ear, in so long. He rolls gracelessly, noisily onto his side, suddenly sure he’s about to start crying. He hasn’t cried in ages.

“Kaito,” he croaks out, only realizing that first names aren’t a thing they do once he’s already said it. Too bad. “Kaito, listen.”

“What? Ku—Shinichi? What’s up? Are you okay?” Kaito sounds anxious, now, because he’s observant enough to have picked up that something is not right here and also kind enough to be concerned. There’s background noise on his end of the line, muffled voices and faint music, the sounds of a restaurant or a party. Maybe he’s out somewhere. “Is there something wrong? You sound kind of weird. And, um, you haven’t responded to my calls and texts for over two weeks, so if that’s related to whatever’s happening right now—”

“Kaito,” Shinichi interrupts. His cheeks feel wet when he reaches up to touch them, which is an embarrassing but unsurprising discovery. He has the stomach-churning feeling that Kaito can hear the dampness in his voice when he says, “Kaito, I don’t want you to die.”

“What? Shinichi? What’s going on?” That’s real alarm, there, unmanufactured, tangible. Shinichi is almost flattered by Kaito’s obvious worry. He curls up against himself, knees cutting into his own chest and arms tight around his shins, phone lodged under his ear.

“I don’t want you to die,” he whispers.

“What? Why would I die?” A second later, the background noise cuts out, as though Kaito’s moved into a quieter place. The lack of noise means that the apprehension in Kaito’s voice is even more evident. “Shinichi, seriously, what’s going on? Have you been drinking? Were you drugged? Do you need help?” Shinichi bites down on his bottom lip hard enough that he’s sure to regret it later. Why doesn’t Kaito understand?

“I’m going to kill you,” he says. He can barely make the sounds come out. He can hear the plaintiveness in his own fragile voice. “I’m going to kill you, and I don’t want to. I don’t want you to die, Kaito.”

“Shinichi, I’m really worried. Why would I die? Or, I guess, why would you kill—”

In a fit of coordination that he doubts he could replicate, Shinichi ends the call and throws his phone at the couch so he doesn’t have to think about what he’s done. It takes him a moment to realize that he’s trembling.

* * *

The next morning, Shinichi’s head makes him aware of just how unhappy it is with his excess drinking by throbbing furiously the second he comes awake. Everything hurts, which is either from dehydration or the fact that he spent the night on his hardwood floors. Groaning, Shinichi carefully— _carefully_ —levers himself to his feet, trying to move as slowly as possible.

The kitchen seems an interminable distance away. The journey there is interspersed with pausing and gripping the wall to fight against regular surges of nausea. He makes it to the kitchen in one piece, though, and downs two glasses of water and several Advil in rapid succession. The headache recedes enough that he can choke down some bread and another glass of water.

It’s a testament to how terrible he’s feeling that he doesn’t look and up and notice Kaito standing in the doorway until he’s finished another piece of bread.

To his credit, Shinichi doesn’t startle. He stands there, feeling wrongfooted and also mildly embarrassed for reasons he can’t verbalize. Instead of looking at Kaito for any longer, he fills his glass again, swallowing against his suddenly dry throat.

“How long have you been there?” he asks once he’s drained his cup. It takes all of his courage to straighten and look Kaito in the face. Kaito is still wearing a coat, one that falls long and unbuttoned against his thighs, but he’s changed into house slippers. His hair is untamed, messy, like unspun cotton, and Shinichi curls his fingers around the edge of the counter, abruptly finding himself up against the urge to reach over and bury his hands in it.

“Long enough,” Kaito says after a long, telling pause. He clears his throat. “Look, Shinichi”—the use of Shinichi’s first name has him flinching in reflex—“I think we need to talk.”

“What a pleasant conversation opener,” Shinichi says, strained. Kaito raises an eyebrow at him. This is the most serious Shinichi has seen him.

“I was okay with giving you some space, all things considered,” Kaito continues, as though Shinichi hadn’t interrupted. “I know we have different views on—the situation. But when you call me, clearly drunk, and start crying about how you don’t want me to die and you don’t want to kill me, I think I’m allowed to get a little worried.”

Shinichi’s throat is dry again, but he thinks it might be a little excessive to drink yet another cup of water. He clears it instead.

“Maybe it was the vodka talking,” he tries. Kaito doesn’t deign to reply to that.

“Shinichi,” he says. Sighs. Shakes his head. “You show up at my house when I’m deathly ill”—(Shinichi’s stomach twists at the turn of phrase)—“clean me up, do my laundry, feed my birds, and take care of my garden, and then you disappear out of my life without a trace. I think, okay, maybe there’s something he needs to work out, he’ll come back when he’s ready, and so I let it go. But then you call me one night, slurring and crying, saying that you’re going to kill me and you don’t have a choice and you don’t want me to die. You don’t have to be the youngest inspector in police history to know that something weird is going on.” Kaito’s jaw is set when Shinichi brings himself to look at him, his gaze unflinching and his expression determined. It’s the face of someone who’s not leaving without answers—clear ones, at that.

Shinichi stares at him. He doesn’t know how his own face looks, but he can feel himself crumbling like wet sand in the tide of Kaito’s—not coldness, or anger, but obstinacy. He feels everything inside him ease away, as though a drain has opened and it’s all swirling out of him, leaving him empty and worn.

“Okay,” he says. “I have something I need to show you. Come with me.”

Kaito follows him easily enough, though Shinichi can sense his confusion as Shinichi leads them up the stairs and down the hall to his bedroom. The familiar notebook sits on his desk where he’s left it as a reminder. Shinichi picks it up. It feels unaccountably heavy in his hands, a brick instead of a book. Kaito is watching him, eyes dark and confused. Shinichi takes a deep, steadying breath.

“So I have a curse mark,” he says. It’s the first time he’s told anyone other than his parents. When he meets Kaito’s gaze, he’s surprised to see something like unabashed hurt written all over his face. “What?”

“I know you’re not the biggest believer in the universe, but that’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” The quiver in Kaito’s voice goes beyond stung; he sounds as though Shinichi has done him some grievous injury. Shinichi blinks at him.

“It’s a curse mark, Kuroba. That’s the clinical diagnosis I got when I was ten.” Kaito’s face blinks from hurt to deeply bewildered.

“What?”

Pressing his lips together, Shinichi unhooks his watch and peels away the leather arms, his movements mechanical. It feels wrong, revealing the gnarled knot of lines marring the untanned skin there to someone. He hasn’t done this since he showed it to the doctor, when he was ten. The expression on Kaito’s face is stunned, as though he opened a door expecting a rose garden and got a corpse instead.

“It’s called the Curse of Tragic Love,” Shinichi says into the silence. “It’s one of those rare hereditary ones, though neither of my parents know which side it’s from.” He’s talking kind of fast now, nerves making it hard to hold back the flood of words pouring out of him. “It means that if I fall in love with someone, both of us die.” Kaito’s head jerks up at that. His eyes are wide.

“ _What_?” There’s something strangled in his voice.

“Yeah,” Shinichi says, swallowing hard. “So when I was around twelve, I came up with a plan. I cast a spell on myself.” Kaito blinks at him.

“As a twelve-year-old?”

“I was precocious,” Shinichi grins, but the moment of levity passes as he looks down at the book he’s still holding. “The spell made it so that I was only able to fall in love with this one specific person who fit all of these criteria that I chose. I picked a bunch of random things that I thought were, probability-wise, unlikely to coincide in a single person, so that the chances of me meeting that person were slim to none. If I never met that person or that person didn’t exist, I thought I’d be safe.”

Kaito stares at him.

“What were your criteria?” he finally asks. Wordlessly, Shinichi hands him the notebook.

It takes Kaito a long, long moment to read through the faded list. Shinichi can track his progression through the list by the way his lips part farther and farther and his eyes skitter back and forth, reading and rereading each line with increasing—emotion. Shinichi can’t place the look on his face. When he finally looks up, Shinichi braces himself.

“Shinichi,” Kaito says, his voice shaking, “this is—is this me?” Shinichi searches his expression, trying to decipher what it means, what he’s feeling, but he comes up empty. He shuts his eyes.

“Yes,” he says. It comes out like a gasp. “Yes, it’s you. And I finally figured out that it was you, but it was already too late, and I didn’t want to be apart from you because, well, you know—but then you got so sick, and I thought that it was because of me, so I tried to leave—but last night I realized that even if I don’t see you, I’m still going to—and we’re both going to die because of this stupid curse—”

“Shinichi,” Kaito says, his tone within striking distance of tender, and Shinichi opens his damp eyes to see Kaito pulling his coat off, dropping it on Shinichi’s bed, moving to yank his leather bracelet off, exposing his bare—

Wait. No. His wrist isn’t bare.

Shinichi takes a shaky, shuddering step forward before he knows what he’s doing. He can feel Kaito’s eyes on his face, watching and waiting. His hands reach out to grasp Kaito’s arm as though he has no control over them.

Written across Kaito’s wrist is _Kudou Shinichi_. Inked in deep blue, against the pale of Kaito’s skin. In Shinichi’s handwriting. With familiar uneven slants in the horizontals and the little tail to the last stroke that shows up when he’s hurrying.

Shinichi doesn’t realize he’s rubbing his fingers over it, trying to smear it, trying to scrub it away, until Kaito makes a soft sound, not pained but concerned. He pulls back instantly, dropping Kaito’s arm entirely, but he can’t stop looking at it. _Kudou Shinichi. Kudou Shinichi._

“What?” he chokes out, barely audible. “What—how?”

“It’s real, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Kaito says, just as quietly. “I didn’t go get your name tattooed on me or anything. It showed up when I was twelve, probably after you cast that spell. I woke up one morning and there your name was. My soulmate mark.”

The room is swimming around him. Shinichi fumbles for something to hold onto. His hand lands on the edge of his desk, which he grips hard enough that he can hear the wood creaking.

“Now you know what I was confused about,” Kaito says, laughing a little. He draws his thumb across the mark. Shinichi blinks hard enough that spots bloom across his vision. “I thought you had my name.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Shinichi manages. He feels as though everything, including the world, has tipped sideways.

“I was going to, since you never acknowledged that we were soulmates. But then that night we were watching movies, you said that you thought soulmates needed time to figure out how they fit together. Do you remember that? So I figured you wanted to just get to know each other better before we really… took that step forward. And then when you started pulling away, I thought you might need some time to sort through stuff.” Kaito’s smile is sad when he reaches out to touch Shinichi’s cheek. His fingertips are warm and dry.

“But this isn’t possible,” Shinichi says when he can’t stand it anymore, either the silence or the heat of Kaito’s touch. “This can’t be right. We can’t be soulmates. I’m _cursed_. That’s not possible.”

“I think at this point, it’s not a question of possible or not,” Kaito says. He reaches out with his other hand to clutch Shinichi’s jaw, so he’s holding Shinichi’s face in his hands. “It’s what’s happening now.” A bubble of panic is expanding in Shinichi’s chest, painful and threatening.

“Kaito, you could die,” he gets out. “I could kill you. I _will_ kill you.”

“That would be a good way to go,” Kaito says, looking far too content with himself for Shinichi’s sanity.

“Kaito,” Shinichi says, and he doesn’t realize he’s pleading until Kaito’s gaze snaps to his. “This is going to end _really badly_. We can’t—I don’t know how I could live if—” He cuts himself off, swallows down the torrent of words building up within him, and tries again. “This is a bad idea.” Kaito regards him for a long, silent moment. Shinichi is shaking hard enough that his teeth are close to chattering.

“Okay.” Kaito’s face settles into a familiar expression of determination. “Let’s go through the evidence. I know you love your evidence. You’re in love with me, right?” Shinichi chokes. Kaito steamrolls on. “And you’ve been in love with me for a while. You had to be in love with me around the time I got sick, otherwise you wouldn’t have freaked out. If you’ve been in love with me that long, why hasn’t either of us died?”

“I don’t know how long it takes for the curse to work.”

“You said yourself that even when you didn’t see me, you were still in love with me. By that reasoning, I should’ve died that time I got sick. It’s not like you stopped seeing me and instantly fell out of love. Therefore, it’s possible that I just happened to get really sick, with really bad timing.”

“Or the universe was trying to warn me.”

“Or you’re overthinking it.”

They look at each other. Neither of them moves. A standoff. A war of attrition.

“Look, I understand,” Kaito says, when he clearly can’t handle the silence anymore. His hold on Shinichi’s cheeks firms. “You have a sign that’s saying no. But I have one that’s saying yes. It’s up to us to choose which one we’re going to follow. You know which one I want.”

“Even if we both end up dying?” Shinichi can’t help but demand.

“Everyone dies someday, Shinichi. And if I get to do it with you, I’ll consider it a life well lived,” Kaito says, which is a horribly blasé statement to make to the person most likely to kill him. Shinichi swallows down the urge to scream and sets his jaw, teeth creaking. Kaito sighs and evidently decides to change his approach, because he says, “Shinichi, I’ve loved you since I was twelve. Ever since I first read your name, I knew that you were going to be the one. I knew that you were going to be exactly what I need. The universe doesn’t make mistakes.”

Shinichi lets out a choked laugh at the blatant lie.

“This whole thing is the universe making a mistake,” he points out, scrubbing a hand across his eyes. Kaito still hasn’t let go of his face, rubbing at Shinichi’s clenched jaw. He’s also slipped closer over the course of the conversation, so they’re almost chest to chest. The warmth of him is real and frightening. It takes Shinichi’s breath away.

“Fine, then. Maybe the universe makes mistakes, but Kudou Shinichi doesn’t. And Kudou Shinichi decided that I was going to be his soulmate.” Despite himself, Shinichi frowns at him, bemused.

“I’m sorry, how did I do that?” he asks. Kaito grins.

“You say that when you cast the spell, you chose random characteristics that you thought couldn’t possibly all describe the same person, but I think you chose traits that you liked. You built someone you thought was too perfect to exist. You chose me. And the universe looked at that, thought about it, and agreed.” He gestures at his wrist. “If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have this. This is evidence of the universe looking at who you chose and agreeing that if there could only be one person you could fall in love with, it should be me. It would be me.”

Shinichi is silent. His heart is in his throat. His eyes are wet when he lets go and drops his forehead against Kaito’s.

“You’re more than just a list of traits. You’re everything,” he says, quiet enough that he thinks Kaito might not have heard him. Kaito does, though, and his whole face flexes, a mix of adoration and longing, before he tilts forward, slow enough to be obvious, and kisses Shinichi on the mouth, soft and undemanding. For a first kiss, it’s unremarkable. The natural progression. Perfect. It feels like giving in, lowering his guard. Unconditional surrender. Dropping his defenses to accept the killing blow. The coup de grâce.

Shinichi is tired of feeling scared. And despite everything, he doesn’t.

They spend an indeterminate amount of time huddled on the floor beside Shinichi’s bed, as if seeking refuge from a thunderstorm only they can hear. Kaito keeps looking at him with nakedly relieved fondness. His hands are both clutching and gentle where he holds Shinichi as though he expects him to evaporate in the rising sunlight. Shinichi, for his part, lets himself burrow into the side of Kaito’s neck, pressing his lips to the soft, flushed skin he finds there.

“I still don’t understand it,” he says quietly. “How you can have so much confidence in this.” Beside him, Kaito laughs, the rumble of it traveling through his chest.

“What, not to be scared off by some curse?” He kisses Shinichi on the forehead when Shinichi twists to frown at him. “Curses and soulmates—they’re what you make of them.” Shinichi feels his nose wrinkle and is unsurprised when Kaito dips in to kiss the tip of it, his eyes crinkled at the corners.

“Are you saying that if I don’t believe in the curse, it won’t do anything? That’s scientifically and historically not true.”

“No, not really. What I mean is…” Kaito trails off, gathering his thoughts. His eyelashes catch the light filtering in from the window behind them. “The curse says that we’ll both die. That could be today, or it could be tomorrow, or it could be in eighty years. Am I right?”

“I guess you’re not technically _wrong_ , at least for this specific curse.” As far as Shinichi knows, there’s no specific timeframe for when the curse will take effect, but he’s always thought it would be prompt. He arches an eyebrow at Kaito when Kaito grins as though he’s won.

“You know what else could happen? We could get in a car accident today, or tomorrow, or in eighty years.” Kaito looks irrepressibly smug with his own false equivalence. Shinichi rolls his eyes, concerned by his own taste, even as he cuddles in closer to Kaito’s side. Their legs are tangled in front of them, Kaito’s ankles bony and white beside his. He has a sock tan that’s stupidly endearing.

“You’re oversimplifying by a lot,” Shinichi murmurs. “A curse ups the chances. It’s a guarantee.”

“There are no guarantees when it comes to the universe, really,” Kaito remarks. Shinichi feels him shift, steeling himself for something. He turns just in time to watch the line of Kaito’s throat undulate as he swallows. “Did—did you know that my parents were soulmates?” Shinichi’s eyebrows jerk upwards without his permission.

“They were?”

“Yeah. But my dad still died, way before my mom. They had the universe’s blessing, but that wasn’t a promise that everything was going to turn out okay.” Shinichi is studying Kaito’s face intently enough that he sees the flicker of pain as it springs up behind his eyes. A storm surge of protectiveness, followed by a wave of guilt, inundates him.

“Kaito…”

“I’m not telling you this so that you feel bad for me,” Kaito says, cutting him off. As Shinichi watches, the flicker dies away, a candle extinguished. “I’m telling you this because I want you to know that at the end of the day, a curse mark doesn’t guarantee eternal despair, and a soulmate mark doesn’t guarantee eternal happiness. It just means that we get to have each other for however long. And that’s something I’m okay with.”

Shinichi can’t help himself; he pushes forward to kiss Kaito on the mouth, more forcefully than he planned. Kaito gives in to it, the way he always gives in to Shinichi, opening his mouth to let Shinichi in. Shinichi’s never felt like this, ready to shake out of his own skin and into Kaito’s, drawn closer than the laws of physics allow. Insatiable. All-consuming.

He drops his face to Kaito’s collarbone when they part for air, both gasping. He thinks his eyes might be wet, because Kaito drags his thumbs across his eyelashes as though to swipe away tears.

“You are so much more than I deserve,” he mumbles. In a watershed moment of clarity, he has a thought that he’s never once even considered: _I am so lucky_.

Kaito’s mouth is warm and welcoming when he scrambles forward for another kiss. This time he gets his hands in Kaito’s hair, which is even softer than expected. They both groan when Kaito’s hands land on his lower back and slide beneath the hem of his shirt.

“I think I’m exactly what you deserve,” Kaito whispers when they break apart again. His eyes are suspiciously shiny in his flushed face. Shinichi sniffs, swallows, and sits back against Kaito’s bent knees.

“Okay, okay, I’m sensing a little too much emotion happening right now,” he announces, even as he scrubs at his own eyes. Kaito laughs, running his hands up and down Shinichi’s sides. His hands feel scalding hot.

“I should’ve known you’d be allergic to _feelings_ ,” Kaito says, his smile wide and red, and Shinichi shakes his head before he dives back in. Kaito grunts once when Shinichi tugs his head back by the hair and clambers fully into Kaito’s lap, then again when Shinichi grinds down.

It’s not long before they make it onto to the bed, desperate and restless as they push inelegantly against each other. It hurts, rutting like this with layers of clothing in between, chafing and too rough, but somehow it feels appropriate, the correct conclusion to this kind of too-full morning. Shinichi barely fumbles Kaito’s shirt off, getting his hands all over Kaito’s chest as he bites frantically at Kaito’s mouth, before one of Kaito’s hands slides down the back of his pants and he comes with a moan at a volume that he’ll be embarrassed about later. Kaito doesn’t take much longer, especially not when Shinichi leans down to suck a mark against his collarbone and fumbles a hand between them to rub clumsily at him through his pants; he goes with a sound like he’s been punched, followed by several panting groans that he breathes into Shinichi’s mouth.

Afterwards, they lie there together for a second before Shinichi makes a sound of disgust.

“I regret not taking my pants off when I had the chance.” He winces and makes to drag them off, but Kaito snorts and gathers him to his chest.

“You could stand to live in the moment a little more, Inspector.” He’s somehow managed to get a hold of each of Shinichi’s hands in his own, gripping hard enough that Shinichi doubts he’ll be able to get out without a fight that he’s unwilling to try. With a sigh, he lets himself flop down on top of Kaito. They lie there, breathing together, skin to skin, for what feels like a few minutes.

“You know, I’m glad you think I fit everything on that list. You know which I agree with the most?” Kaito murmurs into his ear. He’s warm against Shinichi. Solid.

“That you’re the most beautiful person in Japan?” Shinichi can feel Kaito’s laugh reverberate through him.

“No, because that’s you. It’s the one about always being lucky.”

“Really?” Shinichi can hear the surprise in his own voice. “I always thought that one fit the least.”

“It’s the truest,” Kaito says. Shinichi thinks he feels him dab a kiss to the side of Shinichi’s head. They’re pressed together so tightly that Shinichi isn’t sure where he ends and Kaito begins, which feels better than anything he’s ever experienced before. “Because getting to have you as a soulmate? I must be the luckiest person alive.”

Shinichi exhales, so shakily he can hear the catches in the sound when he lets it go. When he turns his face, he can see where Kaito is still holding his hand. Their wrists are pressed together, the inky interwoven curse mark and his own scribbled name. Black to blue. It feels like a promise. He shuts his eyes.

“Okay, fine, you may have been right,” Kaito announces a few minutes later. Shinichi opens an eye to squint at him, apprehensive. “We should’ve taken our pants off. My underwear is glued to me.” He squirms. “Ow, okay, something is stuck somewhere.”

Shinichi sighs.

* * *

“You seem a lot happier today, Inspector,” Horimoto comments as she swings past Shinichi’s desk. With a start, Shinichi realizes that he’s been smiling down at his desk, which is terribly disrespectful to the victims of the murder-suicide case file that he’s supposed to be looking over. He forces himself to stop.

“I guess I am,” he says, mostly to himself, before he looks up at Horimoto and nods. “Observant as always.” Horimoto snorts, then looks faintly ill, as though she’s just remembered that she’s talking to her superior officer.

“Well, I mean,” she stammers, face red, and gets out several more incoherent syllables before she seems to gather herself up into something resembling professionalism. “Permission to speak freely, sir?” Shinichi arches a brow, probably more amused than he should be.

“That’s not what you were doing before, Officer?”

“I—yes?” says Horimoto, unsure, before she sighs. “I just wanted to point out that it’s not hard to tell that you’re happier, Inspector.” When Shinichi continues looking at her, his expression unchanging, Horimoto leans a fraction closer and informs him, “You’re glowing, sir.” Shinichi feels his frown loosen.

“Truer than you might think, Horimoto,” he replies, to Horimoto’s obvious confusion, and waves her off with a smile before he turns his attention back to his desk. If he squints, he can see a faint light spilling out from beneath his wristwatch, softly blue and diffused. It’s been doing that since he and Kaito—to put it in the terms Ran had employed when he told her—“shacked up.” Shinichi isn’t sure if it’s a good sign or a bad omen, but he’s come to terms with hedging his bets. It’s worth it, to be this happy. To be this unafraid.

He’s startled when there’s a sudden commotion out in the hallway, voices both familiar and not rising in excitement. Shinichi is allowed a brief moment to wonder if a particularly interesting murder has popped up before his phone buzzes at his elbow. He has a text from Kaito. Instantly on guard, Shinichi thumbs it open.

 _so if i happened 2 b in the neighborhood and i happened 2 have some bento and i happened to stop in at the station and i happened to get swarmed by a bunch of ur officers wht woud u say AND REMINDER im an amazing super cute bf and u luv me lots_ , it reads. Shinichi blinks twice before a red-faced Yamazaki bursts into the office, slams the door shut behind him, and yells in a hoarse whisper, “Does anyone know why _Kuroba Kaito_ is standing outside our department?” A wave of loud chattering engulfs the bullpen. Five of his officers pull out various reflective objects and begin examining their appearances. One visiting traffic cop drops her coffee all over the shoes of everyone in a four-foot radius, resulting in mass hysteria.

Shinichi sighs and pushes aside the murder-suicide, mentally apologizing to the victims’ faces as he closes the folder on their photos. Time to collect his boyfriend.

* * *

The sound of movement in the kitchen is the first thing to drag Shinichi out of his sleep; the next is the smell of pancakes and a melodic kind of humming that makes him smile before he’s even finished placing its source as Kaito. He’s still not accustomed to the kind of instinctual trust he puts in certain things: the dewy-damp smell of wet soil, lockpicks rattling in window locks. A specific brand of laundry detergent. The texture of worn leather under his fingertips. Humming sporadically seasoned with slight key changes. All Kaito things, accumulated and saved.

There’s footsteps approaching. A squeak as Kaito treads over the creaky floorboard by the open door. Shinichi rolls onto his side, trying to open his eyes against the pull of sleep. He only succeeds partially, and is rewarded by Kaito laughing at him.

“You look awake.”

“You look rude. Stop laughing at me,” is maybe not the wittiest of responses, but it makes Kaito grin at him and rub a hand through his hair. That’s another feeling Shinichi keeps close, one that only Kaito ever gives him.

“So how do we feel about getting up and going to eat the breakfast that I made for us?” Kaito says. Shinichi snuffles and buries his face deeper into the pillow.

“Or I could just keep lying here and you could bring me breakfast in bed,” he mumbles. “You know, since you’re such a gentleman or whatever they’re calling you now.”

“Excuse me, I’ve always been a gentleman,” Kaito sniffs, ignoring Shinichi’s “Yeah, a gentleman _thief_.” “Now I’m just STYLE’s Hottest Person Alive for four years running. People are starting to say I might be a generational talent.” He preens. Shinichi sighs. “And anyway, I refuse. You have to get out of bed for this.” Shinichi cracks open an eye to squint at him, suspicions triggered. Kaito smiles innocuously back at him.

“You know, usually you’re trying to get me _into_ bed, not out of it,” Shinichi says, cogs in his head spluttering into motion with a creak. It takes a bit to get it all started; he’s still not the biggest morning person. “What are you trying to do here?”

“Me? Trying to do something?” Kaito laughs in a perfect imitation of himself. Shinichi’s suspicions grow even stronger, which he conveys with a single eyebrow raise that ignites a spark of panic in Kaito’s expression. “I’ve never tried to do anything in my life, ever. Why would you think that I would try to do something, knowing that I’m not someone who tries to do things ever in his life or not in his life or ever?”

Shinichi cranks his eyes fully open. Kaito looks—flustered, maybe, is the word that Shinichi might use, his cheeks red and his lips wet where he keeps licking at them. His hair is also styled, which is odd for—Shinichi discreetly checks the clock on their bedside table—seven forty-five in the morning, especially when it’s just the two of them staying in. He’s also wearing a shirt that Shinichi recognizes as one that he once tore off of Kaito in a bathroom stall after an awards ceremony at which Kaito had won two out of his three nominations (only partly because of the awards; mostly because the shirt makes Kaito look exceptionally hot).

“Shinichi?” Kaito says, almost hesitant. Shinichi shuts his eyes again.

“I’m assuming there’s a reason why you have to do this in the kitchen, which means there’s some kind of decorating happening. I will accept balloons and a banner. But there better not be any pictures of me blown up in our kitchen,” he says, half into the comforter. “Or confetti. Or _glitter_. And you better have put the ring somewhere sanitary, where it won’t be a choking hazard.”

“Shinichi,” Kaito repeats, in a smaller, distinctly more shaky voice this time. His hand has stopped massaging the nape of Shinichi’s neck. Shinichi flaps a hand blindly at him.

“Go wait in the kitchen,” he says, catching Kaito’s wrist in one hand so he can press a kiss to the inside of his forearm. “I’ll be out in a second.”

“Right,” Kaito says, sounding dazed. “I don’t know what you have against glitter, though.”

“It gets _everywhere_ ,” Shinichi mutters. “Don’t you remember last Valentine’s Day? Never again.”

“But it looked so pretty against your skin!” There is a note of dreaminess in Kaito’s voice that Shinichi distrusts.

“I want a divorce,” he grumbles. He can feel Kaito freeze.

“Is that a yes?” he says, sounding equal parts thrilled and terrified. Shinichi rolls onto his side and props himself up on an elbow, feeling a burst of satisfaction when Kaito’s eyes drag down his bare chest as if magnetized.

“Why don’t you go wait for me in the kitchen and find out?” he suggests. Kaito makes a huffing noise that resembles a relieved laugh.

“Maybe I will,” he agrees. “I do have to take down that life-size nude of you that I put next to the sink.” Shinichi’s eyes fly open. He’s abruptly very awake. While he doesn’t exactly regret the series of drunk nudes he may or may not have sent Kaito that time Kaito was filming overseas for three months, he also never factored their existence into any future marriage proposals, despite how much Kaito has ravenously treasured them.

“ _Kaito_!”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding! It’s not life-sized.”

“Kaito.” Shinichi makes to get up, hands outstretched threateningly. Kaito wheels backwards, grinning.

“Okay, okay, I’m going!” Before he does, though, he ducks in to kiss Shinichi on the mouth, quick and happy. “Happy anniversary, Shinichi.” Shinichi swats at him, feigning annoyance even as he presses forward to steal another kiss.

“Happy anniversary, Kaito.”

Once Kaito has gone, Shinichi flops back against the bed, arms spread wide. He only realizes how widely he’s smiling when he drags a hand over his mouth and finds his lips spread wide. A part of him is embarrassed by how happy he is, but the rest of him is just—happy.

With a satisfied sigh, Shinichi let his head fall to the side. Kaito’s side of the bed is very faintly warm, and it smells like his dumb apple-scented shampoo. Shinichi sweeps his arm over the slight dip in the mattress, fully aware that he’s grinning at an empty bed.

His gaze drifts down to the mark on his wrist. He’s never spent much time examining it. Even after meeting Kaito and loving Kaito and being with Kaito, he still avoids it. It feels too much like tempting fate, like asking the universe if there’s more to come, and if there is, to bring it on. But in the soft safety of the bed he shares with Kaito, in the soft safety of knowing Kaito is steps away, in the soft safety of having this moment, right now, at the very least—Shinichi lets himself look at it. He traces the shimmering lines—in turns curled and angular, bold and thready, translucent and inky. For a single, blinding moment, he sees familiar shapes, in the intersections and twists and parallels. He sees misshapen particles and uneven characters. The ones that spell out Kaito’s name.

Shinichi closes his eyes. He thinks they might be wet.

“Thank you,” he whispers to the universe. The mark glows golden with acceptance.

He gets out of bed and goes to find his soulmate.

**Author's Note:**

> [ catch me on twitter! ](https://twitter.com/lunarscaped)


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